We've been translating keredomo (but) wrong all this time?

Students of Japanese learn the word keredomo very early in the journey. It just means “but”, Right?

We skipped over this word in our examination of Kawabata’s famous sentence from Snow County about Komako’s lips being like a leech:

…鼻が少し寂しいけれども、その下に小さくつぼんだ唇は…
…hana ga sukoshi sabishii keredomo, sono shita ni chiisaku tsubonda kuchibiru ha…

and Seidensticker’s translation:

The…nose was a little lonely, a little sad, but the bud of her lips…

And our translation so far:

Her…nose left something to be desired, but below it her tightly puckered lips…

What’s the problem? Doesn’t keredomo equal “but”, end of story? Actually, it seems that the following translation could be preferable:

Although her…nose left something to be desired, below it her tightly puckered lips…

In other words, instead of connecting the two thoughts about the nose and the lips with “but”, a coordinating conjunction, we should be connecting them with “although”, a subordinating conjunction (or “though”, which is identical for all practical purposes). This reflects the fact that the issue with her nose is subordinate to her overall beauty as exemplified by her lips.

But what’s wrong with but?

What’s wrong with “but”? Let’s examine the dictionary definition:

used to introduce a phrase or clause contrasting with what has already been mentioned.

In other words, “but” does not impose, or assume, or convey, any specific relationship between the preceding and following concept. They are equal. That is why it is called a coordinating conjunction. The underlying meaning might be some kind of exception to a more general proposition, or a more general conception to which the preceding phrase was an exception, or simply two concepts that stand in contrast, but the “but” is agnostic as to which; figuring that out is entirely up to the reader.

In contrast, “although” always positions the adverbial phrase it introduces as an exception or a carve-out, a subsidiary exclusion to the more general thought in the following phrase.

Bottom line: in far too many cases, we are translating keredomo with a “but” introducing the second thought, when it should be an “although” introducing the first.

In addition to being semantically more accurate, using the “(al)though”, referred to as a “contrastive conjunction” or “contradictory conjunction”—in Japanese, 逆接—has other advantages. First of all, it makes it easy to move the subordinate clause to the end of the sentence, if we decide that we want to present the “main” clause to the reader first, which is not uncommon. So we can write “Her lips were this and that, although her nose left something to be desired”. Second, if the “although” phrase does remain first, it alerts the reader that this is an exception or a contrastive subordinate clause and prepares them for the main thought to follow.

In the case of the Kawabata sentence, I think it is clear that the overall impression to be conveyed is that the problem with her nose was a minor distraction from the beauty of her lips and way they moved.

Other ideas for translating keredomo, depending on your mood or the context, include “in spite of” and “except for”. “Even though” can be used as a stronger version of “though”.

We can also play with the syntax of the contrastive phrase to make it a little snappier:

忙しいけど行くことにした。
isogashii kedo iku koto ni shita.
As busy as I am I decided to go.

Other contrastive conjunctions in Japanese

Other 逆接 (contrastive conjunctions) constructs in Japanese that you will encounter in addition to keredomo include no-ni, -te-mo or -to-mo, and ga. All of these are amenable to the “al/though” translation. no-ni has more of a nuance of emotion—something the speaker found odd or unsatisfying. -te-mo has more of a hypothetical flavor.

ga is the same as keredomo for all practical purposes, although it would normally be used in more formal settings. But why is the ga we all know as a subject marker (in Japanese 格助詞, or “case particle”) used this way? It turns out that the use of ga as a contrastive conjunction is a repurposing of the ga functioning as case particle.

Be careful though; especially with ga, there are cases when the intention is not to draw a contrast, but just provide background information or introduce context:

先日の件ですが
senijitsu no ken desu ga
About that thing we were talking about

If you ever translate ga as “but” and the two halves don’t seem to be contrasting like you expected, you may have encountered this flavor of ga.

Other forms of keredomo

We also see a variety of shortened forms of keredomo: keredo, kedomo, and kedo. In case you were wondering, keredomo arose in the late Middle Ages, as the 已然形 (izenkei/past perfective) suffix of an adjectival past conjugation kere, with the conjunctive particle domo attached, which then broke off and was used as a stand-alone word. A direct translation might therefore be “even if it were”. In the early modern era the informal shortened forms keredo and kedo appear, followed later by kedomo.

We should also mention the use of keredomo at the beginning of a sentence, preceding some statement contrasting to what went before. “however” is often a useful way to translate this, whether placed at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end of the English sentence.

And then of course there is the use of keredomo all by itself at the end of a sentence, leaving the listener or reader to infer what the contrary condition might be.

もう飯食ったけれど

“I already ate, but [I’ll have a piece].” In English, could this be “I already ate, but you know”?