Random Phrase: A Process of Translation

Just poking around in the news section of 2Chan - which is not even vaguely a worksafe site; seriously, that place has stuff that creeps me out! Anyway, don't go - and I found this random phrase, which I just happened to like. It's talking about a solid state drive that this guy found in Akihabara.

数ヶ月行かないと、浦島太郎になる街だな
or
suu ka-getsu ikanai to, urashima tarou ni naru machi da na

Now, to get you started, let's first define everything, and we'll see if you can get what it means. Should be fun, right?

Now, when trying to decipher a sentence in Japanese, it's often easiest to start at the end of the sentence. The last word is na, which is what's known as a "sentence final particle", or shuujoshi. It's meaning is kind of like "Don't you think?" or "...you know?", but it's a more rhetorical than anything else. It softens the statement a little by implying that the reader already knows this, and probably agrees.

Next up is da, the plain form of the copula (if that doesn't make sense, don't worry). In other words, it means "is/are". As an example pen da means "it is a pen", though the "it" and the indefinite article "a" are not in the Japanese, because the language, for the most part, doesn't have them. So far, we have "... isn't it?"

machi means "town", but we want to say "place" in English, because "town" conveys a sense of one whole unit, instead of a piece of something larger. So far: "... town, isn't it?"

We'll take the next two words as one to make things simpler, and so this post doesn't end up with a hojillion paragraphs: ni naru. This is "to turn into" or "to become". naru is the verb and ni is the "to" of "turn into". This will make the translation a little iffy if you do it directly and in order, but best of luck. So far: "[the kind of] town [where you] become ... , isn't it?" The brackets indicate implied things, or things that simply aren't there in Japanese due to grammatical differences.

Next bit will also be a two-word chunk, as it's a name: urashima tarou, which like the Japanese version of Rip van Winkle, the guy who fell asleep for twenty years, missed the American Revolution, and woke up to entirely different world. So far: "[the kind of] town [where you] become Rip van Winkle , isn't it?"

to is next up, and serves a variety of purposes based on context and placement, but here is a simple conditional. You could say "if", "when", "and", or "then", depending on where in the English sentence you're presumably making you would put it. So far for this clause: "...and".

ikanai is the plain, nonpast form of iku "to go", so we translate it as "don't/won't go". Japanese has a very confusingly slightly existent future tense, but don't worry about it here, because it's just your normal habitual present tense. So far for this clause: "... don't go and"

ka-getsu is kind-of-sort-of one work, but kind-of-sort-of two words, as well. It effectively means "months", but specifically "in duration" as opposed to "of the year". By itself it's a little weird, so let's tack on suu "numerous", and we get suu ka-getsu, or "a number of months" or "a few months". So this clause in its entirety "Don't go for a couple of months and..."

And we have one remaining problem, which is that the first half the sentence (before the comma) and all the way up to ni naru, are all modifying the word machi "town". This makes necessary a little rearranging to make intelligible English. So, we put it all together, put our patented Lingua-Blender on puree, and what comes out?

"It's the kind of town where if you don't go for a couple of months,
and you become Rip van Winkle, you know?"
suu ka-getsu ikanai to,
urashima tarou ni naru machi da na

If you have no idea how I came to that final sentence from the little bits, try highlighting the whole page (Ctrl+A ought to work well) and you should be able to see some additional hints about how I got from the Japanese to the English.