For a research project I am trying to understand a paper that originally
appeared in Japanese and that also has an official English translation.

In the original, 当り前 appears. In the official translation it is rendered as
"must-be", but as far as I can tell, this means "natural", "obvious" or
"taken-for-granted".

Can anyone clear this up for me?

Thank you

I have included a scan of the title of the original paper. [![why is 当り前 must
be?](https://i.stack.imgur.com/MHfCQ.png)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/MHfCQ.png)
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translation
why has 当り前 been translated as "must-be" here?
While it may be an _'official English translation'_ , that does not mean that
it was originally done by a native English speaker.

That being said, it is not really wrong, as individual translations need not
have consensus.

当たり前 means 'it is or should be considered as obvious/natural/a given'. It
should 'go without saying'.

> The quality of our product is so obvious/natural that it would be absurd to
> assume otherwise. For us and our customers, this level of quality is 'a
> must'. **It 'must be' this level of quality for us to put our name on it.**

**_Must-have quality_** might sound a mite better and make more sense, but
they're not going to reprint everything now.

Edit: Thanks to @Locksleyu 's answer and reference of the Wikipedia entry,
'Having special appeal and meeting basic (obvious;given) thresholds' seems to
be the intended message behind the paper you posted.
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I generally agree with the points that user27280 has raised, but I wanted to
give some additional context here.

From the viewpoint of modern English, "must-be" sounds outdated and perhaps
even hard to understand for some native speakers. So I was to translate the
passage in question I might not use such a phrase.

However, 当たり前品質 looks like a domain-specific term which may have been invented
by Kano (狩野), and seems to be translated frequently as "must-be". (See the
[English Wikipedia page on the Kano
model](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kano_model))

In light of this, while a bit cryptic and aged, "must-be" does seem like an
apt translation given the fact that it is a single (compound) word that
expresses the concept efficiently. As user27280 mentioned, it would be
possible to translate as "considered as obvious", but that would be too wordy
and clash with the feel of the original term in Japanese. Note, it could be
argued that "当たり前な品質" would be a more everday way of expressing this in
Japanese.

Furthermore, even if someone wanted to translate this term in a different way
and use a more modern-sounding English expression, it might be frowned upon
since it would deviate from what appears to be an industry standard term.
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The paper wanted to say something like an English phrase "Certificated
quality" or so to be equivalent.  
But he doesn't know English as well as I do.

当たり前 itself would be translated into another Japanese word 当然 _touzen_ , which
has various meanings.

  1. matter of course 
  2. foregone conclusion

are the best translations.
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