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I'm translating the following line of dialogue spoken by Character A to Character B.

「怖がらなくてもいいわ。もう襲ったりしないから」

The translations I made are the following:

"There’s no need to be afraid. Because I will no longer be attacking you anymore.”

"There’s no need to be afraid. Because I will be no longer attacking you anymore.”

This became a issue on the English stack exchange, when I tried asking for some help with the placement of the word 'be', as shown in the above link.

A commenter over there suggested "Because I will not be attacking you anymore." which sounds stilted for the character's dialogue.

I need some possible English translations that will work for the translation of しない (to do nai form I.E. "will no longer/will not be" in the above translations), that are not stilted or flow similar to Japanese.

My reason for requesting a translation that will flow similar to Japanese is that this story is similar to Star Wars as far as languages go. Its similar in that the in-story language being spoken by the characters is currently Japanese, but as a translator, I need to convey this using the vernacular of the English language.

TDLR: What is a good English replacement for "will no longer/will not be" that is natural in English and flows similar to Japanese?

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    won't attack you anymore????
    – Ringil
    Apr 20, 2019 at 5:22
  • 2
    Is this a question of Japanese or English?
    – Mathieu Bouville
    Apr 20, 2019 at 8:34
  • 4
    It really does seem to me like you’re asking about English here.
    – user1478
    Apr 20, 2019 at 10:38

1 Answer 1

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This thread may well be closed, as the question does indeed seem to be more about the English than the Japanese. That said, here's my take:

When translating, it's often more important to focus on the meaning and intent, and to convey that in a natural fashion. For example, Japanese often structures things as ABC。XYZ から → Thing ABC. Reason XYZ. English often relates similar content with either the reverse order, or by putting the two sentences together. As examples: "I'm done attacking you, so you don't need to be afraid anymore." Or, "No need to be afraid, I'm done attacking you." Etc.

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    This is pretty much exactly the answer I was going to post, +1. Sometimes when I'm really struggling to translate something into natural English, I'll produce an (awkward) literal translation, and then focus on rewriting that English into better English.
    – Mindful
    Apr 22, 2019 at 19:16
  • @Mindful: That's a good approach, and one that native-English writing teachers sometimes advocate -- get the words on paper first to get the meaning down, and then work on polishing it into better wording and smoother fluency.
    – Eiríkr Útlendi
    Apr 22, 2019 at 19:18

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