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A line from a Japanese song that I am trying to translate into English is "たわいない 判らない 理由 存在". Separately I understand these words to mean trivial, don't understand, reason, and existence, respectively, but I'm having trouble coming up with a semantic translation. The best I've come up with is "The trivial, incomprehensible reason for existence". I think what's throwing me off is the "理由 存在" part. I feel like "存在 理由" makes more sense.

For context, the rest of the verse is:
あなたと残す後悔
誰も読めないカルテ
不愉快 繰り返して

Which I have translated as:
The regret after leaving you
An inexplicable medical record
The unpleasantness repeats

Thank you!

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Judging from the whole lyrics, I must say this part is intentionally constructed so that it looks somewhat like "word salad". Throughout the lyrics, there are quite a few randomly-appearing words whose grammatical roles are not clear to me (e.g., 鼓動, 眩暈, 思春期, ...). Maybe you have to stop trying to parse them as a grammatical sentence. (Unfortunately many Japanese songs are like this...) It appears to me that the lyrics focus more on rhyming and rhythm than semantics. For example, "思春期 傷口 胸のうち" is grammatically just three phrases placed in parallel, but it does rhyme (i-i-i) and follow the 4-4-5 pattern. Of course in this case we can imagine a story like "I hide my adolescent wound within my heart", but that may not be always possible.

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  • I noticed that too! I ended up translating that part to "The wounds from adolescence are buried in my chest". For the original line I was concerned about and this one, are these reasonable translations? I'm planning on making a translation video for this song, which is why I wanted to be as accurate as possible.
    – ljjel
    Commented Jun 13, 2020 at 2:55
  • @ljjel Well, the line strikes me like "It's trivial, no I dunno, the reason, the existence"... But I'd say "reason for existence" is not a good interpretation because that's 存在理由 or 存在の理由.
    – naruto
    Commented Jun 13, 2020 at 3:00

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