Quote:
Originally Posted by raulus
I don’t speak Japanese, but I do speak Chinese. As luck would have it, a solid chunk of Japanese is based on Chinese, so often the characters have similar meanings, although they have sometimes changed a bit over time.
念纪 can mean a lot of different things depending on the context. But in this context, memorial works well.
大 means big, large or great.
戰 means a battle or a fight
球 means a ball
野 has a few different meanings, but usually I would translate it as wild, untamed, or undomesticated. Could be that ball wild was the Japanese word for baseball 115 years ago.
So based on Chinese, I would definitely agree with the memorial great battle baseball (or wild ball) translation.
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I’m a bit late to this, but as the board member resident in Japan I thought I’d chime in anyway.
The kanji 野球 (Yakyuu) is still the word for baseball in Japanese actually (“Pro Yakyuu” is what Japanese people call the professional league here). 野 in Japanese means “field” (among other things) and 球 means “ball” so you can see why they combined those two to describe baseball.
A lot of the characters in that photo have dual military and sports usages, so Google Translate makes it sound more militarized than it actually is.
軍 (“gunn”) can mean both “army” and “team”, in baseball it refers to the latter.
戦 (“Sen”) can mean both “battle” and “game”. In the baseball context it refers to the latter.