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I don't have a Japanese sentence example of something long, but let's say I
have to sentence that has two clauses that are separated with a が followed by
a comma. You feel that this second clause that sounds more natural in English
when translated to be at the front of a sentence than towards the back. Is it
possible to move stuff around within the complete sentence or should I treat
two clauses as separate parts when I'm translating it.

Right now I've only been reading simple sentences like:

彼女は、学生じゃなくて、先生だ。 She is not a student, she is a teacher.

Apologize ahead of time if this question seems vague.

Edit: How about a sentence like this: 嫌がらせの可能性も、山口さんは捨てきれなかったが。

The last が in the sentence I thought perhaps it could be a colloquial way to
trail off in a sentence like "but..." More like it's seems better to say
Unfortunately or Although at the beginning of the sentence.

Although Yamaguchi-san couldn't discard the possibility of also being
harrassed.

So, is it perfectly possible to move the second half of this sentence to the
front of if translated in an English sentence and first half towards the end?

I been usually just been keeping both halves separate where they are and not
moving words around much from where they are between the clauses if that makes
any sense.
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2015-03-13T21:30:33.290
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2015-03-16T05:31:59.817
2015-03-13T23:11:00.237
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grammar
Sentence structure between two clauses question
Your question is about ordering of phrasing in translation, at least that's
how I interpret it.

It's a good question. Here are some foolish examples:

> 東京に行った私が新しいシャツを買った

Destination Verb Subject が Object Verb.

In English, we can render it naturally like:

Subject Verb Destination, Verb Object.

roughly, for sake of illustration:

> The me that went to Tokyo bought a new shirt.

As you can tell by the breakdown of grammatical pieces, they are pretty much
entirely reversed (by clause). You can find numerous examples of situations
where live-interpreters have to wait until the very end of a long sentence to
hear the verb being used, before they can start to translate into English (or
whatever).

So feel free to switch the clauses around if it sounds natural. The word order
is not exactly "anything goes" but "backwards" or "inverse" might be a good
term to describe the changes one can make (really what one should strive for)
when translating complex sentences from Japanese to English.

> So, is it perfectly possible to move the second half of this sentence to the
> front and the first half towards the end?

Precisely so my friend.
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