Hi Lilian,
You know, actually this is kind of a "joke" text. The Romanization is:
Saru de gozaru
"Saru" means "monkey" and "de gozaru" is a strange archaic way of using the very polite form of the verb "to be."
Usually, in modern Japanese, people say "gozaimasu," not "gozaru."
The reason why they use this strange polite form is, "go
zaru" sounds like "saru," so
saru de go
zaru is a kind of play on words, Ã la japonaise...
It was a "funny phrase" that people used to use maybe about five (?) years ago here in Japan. 
(Like in America, people often used to say "Where's the Beef?" because an old lady on a popular TV commercial said it. Did you ever hear of that?)
So now you know
why this
kind of strange text is here: I think someone wanted to see how we would translate this "play on words/rhyme/joke phrase" into other languages.
Now of course, in English, the "joke" feeling is lost. But how can we translate the meaning? Well, we can think of it in context: if I asked you "What is that animal?" you could reply "saru de gozaru." In English, we would have two options: we could say
"It is a monkey."
or simply
"A monkey."
But as you know, we could not say
*"Is a monkey"
If I understand Spanish grammar, though, I think you could say
Es un mono
and this is very close to the Japanese
Saru
= monkey + de gozaru
= be verb.
So maybe "Es un mono" is the best translation into Spanish of this?
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- 11 Februari 2008 14:52
