Reading a book in original language can help you to get that information which you will never get if you will read the same book in translation.
While that information may give you only insignificant minor details which may be interesting only for those who are interested in academical linguistics (I consider myself as a such person), mistranslation or omitted significant details may leave a reader in the state of unconscious misunderstanding. Misunderstanding not of a translated text, but of an original one.
Some details may play a huge role in correct understanding of a text. They are important.
Below I will analyze the first sentence of the original Japanese text of the prologue for the light novel Sound! Euphonium Volume I by Ayano Takeda.
何百という顔が、一様に同じ方法を見つめていた。Hundreds of faces were uniformly gazing at the same direction
While I am interested in linguistic nuances of this sentence I would like to think also about the content of the novel.
In this sentence I’ve found interesting usage of という pattern. It cannot be understood as denoting direct speech. It doesn’t give name of the thing (“the face(s) called ‘Hundreds’ “): the context doesn’t support such hypothesis. It doesn’t describe any rule, opinion, incident, article etc.
The JMdict (Japanese-Multilingual Dictionary) gives possible clue: <after a quantity> as many as, as much as. 何百 is certainly a quantitative: how many (several). So, 何百という顔が can be translated as “as many as several hundreds faces”. But I translated simply ‘hundreds of faces’. I’ve searched in Google the phrase ‘何百という顔’. It seems to me that the Japanese use ‘何十という’ and ‘何百という’-like patterns to denote a number of things. It’s very likely that they usually don’t use 何百顔 although it is theoretically possible word. The common phrase is 何百という.
一様に denotes equality (uniformity) of action of those several hundreds of faces: all of them do the same thing – they are gazing at the same direction.
Why such uniformity of action is described in the very first sentence of the novel? Who are those faces?
Obviously, they are the participants of secondary school wind bands’ competition. They were anticipating the announcement of the results. That’s why they were gazing intensely at the direction of the scene.
How many times such situation did happen in the history of such competitions? Hundreds, if not thousands, times. Internal intensity of anticipation… Flood of adrenalin… But for what purpose?.. Hibike! Euphonium not only entertains but it also gives food to mind for analyzing competition custom from the perspective of the participants.
