Books
Saturday, May 28, 2011
Japanese Children’s Books in English
Published and aspiring translators of Japanese children’s literature into English have e-networked for several years through the SCBWI Tokyo Translation listserv, an email list open to members and non-members of SCBWI.
Several members of this list have now begun a group blog about publishing Japanese children's lit in English translation. The blog also highlights the children’s literature and culture of Tohoku in the wake of the March 2011 disasters.
The latest post on the blog is an interview with SWET member Cathy Hirano about her translation of the fantasy novel Mirror Sword and Shadow Prince by Noriko Ogiwara (VIZ Media, May 2011)—the sequel to Dragon Sword and Wind Child (VIZ Media, 2010), which Hirano discussed in an interview for SWET Newsletter No. 122.
Several SWETers participate in both the SCBWI Tokyo Translation listserv and the group blog. To learn more, please visit the blog or email the organizers.
Books • General • Writing • Fiction • (0) Comments • Permalink
Sunday, December 14, 2008
Review: Improving Translation Quality
A colleague at my office recently lent me her copy of Kevin Morrissey’s Improving Translation Quality (the Japanese title is ?????????????—??????????), a very useful guide to measuring and improving the quality of technical translations that was produced with help from Hitachi Technical Communications Inc.
There is, of course, a great deal of technical information produced in Japan that needs to be translated into English for consumption in markets overseas, but there is not always a clear understanding of what constitutes a good translation and what distinguishes it from a merely passable or even an unacceptable one. This book addresses that need by providing a general overview of the issues facing technical translation in a Japanese-to-English context, providing specific examples of common problems in the field, by introducing Hitachi’s Translation Evaluation System (TES), and by offering suggestions on how Japanese source documents can be prepared to facilitate the process of translating them into English.
The book is intended for J-to-E translators, but also for native English editors and translation managers. It also thoughtfully acknowledges the fact that, although organizations like SWET and JAT tend to emphasize that J-to-E translations are best left to native speakers of English, the reality in Japan is that often non-native speakers of the target language are responsible for producing translations in English; and so the book offers recommendations accordingly, including the common arrangement of having a native speaker of English edit the translation prior to publication.
The author emphasizes the importance of having a system for making judgments about the quality of translations, because without such a system of making distinctions based on quality, cost alone tends to become the deciding factor when purchasing translations, which can lead to undesirable results. For this purpose, the author introduces TES, a system that breaks down common errors in J-to-E technical translations into several categories that are represented by various error codes. Incorrect or missing articles (a, an, and the), for example, are TES error code 01, and problems with subject/verb agreement are TES error code 02, and so on for a total of 27 types of errors in nine categories (grammar, spelling, unnatural English, meaning, clarity, poor verb usage, terminology, inconsistency, and conformity with stylistic requirements).
A native speaker of English would use these codes as a rubric for arriving at a quality score based on the number of errors per 1000-word sample, which would then be used to assign a grade to the translation. The author recommends grades ranging from “A” for a very good translation to “D” for an unacceptable one. Under this system, a translation with ten or more errors per 1000 words is deemed to be of insufficient quality and must be fixed. For translations of less than 1000 words, the author also recommends a simplified “Pass/Fix” grading system, in which case only translations with no errors get a passing grade. (This system is somewhat different from the one I have used in my own work, which seeks to evaluate errors by how critical they are, but I have no doubt that this approach is very effective at providing a basis for making comparisons about the quality of the work produced by different translators.)
The book also offers standard technical writing guidelines for the Japanese authors of technical documents, who quite possibly have even more influence over the quality of the final translation than the translator does (after all, even a fantastic translator cannot be expected to produce a good translation from a document that was not very well organized in the original Japanese). This is the part of the book that filled me with a desire to put a copy in the hands of all the “clients” in our office, the people who prepare the original documents for translation. Fortunately, the entire book is written in both English and Japanese—including the recommendation from the chairman of the Japan Technical Communicators Association in the front and the indexes in the back—which makes it easy to share even with people who are not translators themselves.
The translation of technical documents from Japanese to English is certainly a fairly specific niche in the overall translation market, but within that niche, this book addresses many of the important considerations in producing high-quality translations. For this reason alone, this book should be regarded as required reading by anyone getting started in the field or anyone who needs to be able to evaluate the quality of J-to-E technical translations.
Saturday, December 06, 2008
Review: How to Succeed As a Freelance Translator
I recently had the opportunity to read Corinne McKay’s How to Succeed As a Freelance Translator, and I’m really glad I did.
I’ve been doing freelance translation for a number of years now, but this book made me wish I had read it before getting started. It would have helped me get off to a better start—and definitely would have helped me avoid some of the mistakes I’ve made.
A lot of the advice contained in this book you can get from working translators for the asking (for example, on SWET-L, Honyaku, or the JAT list), but this is the only resource I know of that gathers all of those useful tidbits of information into one convenient book.
McKay starts out with an overview of the translation business in the first chapter, and then follows it with practical advice on how to start and build up your business, maximize productivity, set up your office, make use of speech recognition and translation memory software, set and negotiate rates, and keep your clients satisfied. The book is written in general terms, so there is not a lot of advice specific to working as a translator in Japan, but it provides a great starting point for further exploration. (For information specific to Japan, take a look at Tom Gally’s Getting Started as a Translator: Gleanings from Honyaku.)
How to Succeed As a Freelance Translator can easily be read in a single day, but that one day’s worth of reading can really help you get off on the right foot for the rest of your career in freelance translation.
Monday, June 09, 2008
Learn Urawaza Skills, Win a Prize from Lifehacker
Late last week I noticed that Lifehacker had posted a review of Lisa Katayama’s Urawaza: Secret Everyday Tips and Tricks from Japan and this week, I see that they are holding a video contest to see who has the best urawaza skills. Seeing as how most members of the SWET community live in Japan, there should be someone among us who can win this contest hands down.
You’ll have to hurry if you want to enter, though. Entries are due “no later than Tuesday, June 17.”
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Junot Diaz wins Pulitzer for “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao”
Recently seen in the news:
Junot Diaz’s Novel, “Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” Wins Pulitzer
April 7 (Bloomberg)—Junot Diaz’s first novel, “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,’’ won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction today, having already won the National Book Critics Circle Award.
Diaz first made a splash with a book of short stories, “Drown,’’ in 1996, and then spent 10 years writing “Oscar Wao,’’ the story of a geeky boy from a Dominican family living in New Jersey.
This is interesting news for me because the author is a close friend of a colleague of mine at work. Having read The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, I can say that it is certainly worthy of a Pulitzer. I have yet to read Drown, but it also comes highly recommended by a number of people whose opinions about literature are generally right on the money. Consider reading either (or both). I don’t think you will regret it.
Tuesday, February 12, 2008
And Your Point Was?
Many people use PowerPoint in their presentations. Most people use it badly. They’re the people who need Garr Reynolds’s book. But they’re unlikely to read it. More’s the shame.
Presentation Zen (Garr Reynolds, New Riders, © 2008) is a plea for better use of PowerPoint and other slideware. The fact that PowerPoint slides are often terrible—filled with small print that distracts from the speaker’s message—does not mean slideware is inherently evil. It just means it is misused—it is used the way the engineers and software companies want us to use it instead of the way audiences want us to use it. So quit doing that!
Remember that the slides are to illustrate your talk. They aren’t the talk. Nor are they the handout. They’re to complement your talk and help people understand the main points. So keep them simple. Keep them graphic. Keep them focused on what you really want to say. There is not even any need to use garish colors, animation, 3D, or other “hey look at me” razzle-dazzle. Just say it simply. Forcefully. Effectively.
Yes, he’s right. Spend time figuring out what you want to say to this audience and how best to say it, which may well include using slideware. If you want to say sheep are mammals, showing a lamb nursing is almost certainly more effective than showing a long scholarly definition of “mammal.” If you want to say Japan has a lower incidence of obesity than the United States does, showing side-by-side backsides probably makes the point more effectively than a sheet of small-print statistics does.
Unfortunately, I have two reservations about recommending this book—even though I unreservedly recommend his message. One is that he—and maybe this is his publisher’s fault?—spends a lot of time gee-whizing Japan and Japanese culture. Talk about the bento. Talk about judo. Talk about Zen. Talk about all of these other Japanesque things that help make his point but that are likely to grate on people who live here and don’t envision Japan as some exotic wonderland of design excellence. And my other reservation is that he does not take his own advice. He says to keep things simple and direct. He points out that people’s attention is in limited supply and you should not waste their time. And then he writes page after page of small print about this.
However, if you sometimes have to give presentations, or even if you just have influence with someone who has to give presentations, Presentation Zen is worth reading. Get a copy, read it, photocopy-enlarge the “in sum” page from the end of each substance chapter:
1. Presenting in Today’s World
2. Creativity, Limitations, and Constraints
3. Planning Analog
4. Crafting the Story
5. Simplicity: Why It Matters
6. Presentation Design: Principles and Techniques
7. Sample Slides: Images & Texts
8. The Art of Being Completely Present
9. Connecting with an Audience
And just put those sheets up on your wall.