Abstract
Japanese noun modifier structures are generally hard to catch and tricky for Japanese-Chinese translators
from Taiwan because of their complexity and lengthiness. This paper aims to investigate their difficulties and
how to do with agents and patients when translating the structures. By contrasting explicitness of agent and
patient noun phrases in the structures, the study formulates a hypothesis of the possible causes of difficulty.
Then by using the hypothesis it analyzes sample sentences translated by Taiwanese translators speaking
Mandarin Chinese natively in order to find common problems and identify the reasons of mistranslation. It
also examines how the findings could be applied to Japanese language education and translation education.
Finally it proposes three solutions: 1) specifying case relations, 2) specifying and expressing agents and
patients as words and 3) grasping the structure in each noun modification. And it emphasizes that none of
these three should be ignored as they relate to each other.
https://ror.org/05bx1gz93 
