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I am having difficulty translating something (I am translating as an excerise), how would one translate a more instrumental sentence, like:

"Charlie sweetens the cake with sugar" "Arthur killed Mordred with Excalibur"

I know how to say "Charlie sweetens the cake", but I am having difficulty working in the "with sugar" part. I know で is used for an instrumental noun, but I am not exactly sure where in the sentence one would place it. I tried multiple different placements in google translate, but I can't get it right, and Google translate is also getting confused by a lot of the words, mostly the transliterated names.

So, can somebody help me with this so that I can better learn Japanese sentence structure and translate what I am trying to translate? It is just hard to translate sentences when they start to get more complicated, like the ones mentioned, and it is hard to look up more specific minutia of grammar such as this. Please and thank you.

(This is not the exact sentence I am trying to translate, but it is of a similar structure and such)

チャーリーがケーキお甘くする砂糖で actually seems to work when I put it in with far more real-world words. I think google translate was mostly getting really confused by the fantasy terms and extra possessives. Is this right?

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  • Please write your attempts of translation. Maybe they are correct.
    – Arfrever
    Aug 6 at 23:57
  • I edited it with an attempt I just did that seemed to work, is that right? Aug 7 at 0:06

1 Answer 1

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チャーリーがケーキお甘くする砂糖で

Japanese clauses normally have NOUN1 PARTICLE1 NOUN2 PARTICLE2 NOUN3 PARTICLE3 ... VERB structure. In speech, it sometimes happens that speaker remembers to say additional information after already saying verb, but if you are writing this sentence, it is better to write it in more correct form.

Direct object marker should be written as を (sometimes romanized as wo), not as お.

You can add topic particle は, replacing が.

In naturally sounding sentences, when not trying to emphasize something, subject should be at the beginning, and direct object close to verb. In this case 砂糖で would be between them.

So corrected sentence would be:

チャーリーは砂糖でケーキを甘くする

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