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I am trying to teach myself some Japanese and I wanted to find out how to say "I don't trust anyone" or "I no longer trust this person (because of a bad experience".

So I thought it was a good idea to use Google translate and I got the following confusing results:

"I cannot trust anyone" gets translated to "私は誰を信頼することはできません"

but

"I don't trust anyone" gets translated to "私は誰を信用していません"

even though the meaning of the word trust in both English sentences is the same (as there is only one meaning of "to trust someone" in English).

Next I tried "I don't trust you" which gets translated to "私はあなたを信頼していません".

But why not "私はあなたを信用していません"?

Please could one of the native speakers here on this forum explain to me the nuances of 信用 and 信頼?

Personally, completely disregarding Google translate, I would say

"(あなたに)信用しないよ"

in a situation where for example the person I am talking to suggests to pick me up and drive me to the airport in time to catch a flight but I express my concern about their reliability.

And what would a spouse say to their better half after being cheated on? "あんたに信頼できない"?

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1 Answers1

6

A Japanese thesaurus has an entry.

In short, 信用 means that you believe them not to lie to you, and 信頼 that you trust them to work as you expected. These are often but other aspects of the same matter, but for example, a clever lawyer might be 信用できないが信頼できる to the client, and your nice but incompetent friend is 信用できるが信頼できない to you.

Unfortunately, Google Translate is 信用も信頼もできない. The result you got was likely to be an accidental difference in the source text (for "trust" can be translated either way) of parallel corpora they use.
(And it totally failed to translate "not any" construction into meaningful expression.)

PS
Both 信用 and 信頼 take objects with を case. Google was right on this point.

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