General
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
Tuesday, May 17, 2011
SWET in the Wake of the 3-11 Disaster
Among the majority of wordsmiths active in Japan today who stayed put, despite the recurrent shakings, the upset economy, and the Fukushima nuclear power plant crisis, many have been quietly contributing both to helping out and to helping understand what has happened. Here are just a few heard about recently. Please let us know of others to share from this page at weblog@swet.jp.
- More than fans of Wm. (Wilhelmina) Penn’s weekly TV column in the Daily Yomiuri newspaper will appreciate at “This Week in Japan” the skillful weaving of what we see on Japanese television with facts and the social commentary in her blog.
- Writer and translator Leza Lowitz’s article about marching against nuclear power plants appeared on the Huffington Post “Red Room” site. A Berkeley-bred powerhouse sounds in her element.
- SWET and SCBWI translators have been helping get the word out in English about the “3.11 Picture Book Japan in Iwate” activities to support children whose lives were overturned by the tsunami.
- Sapporo-based translator and writer Deborah Davidson introduced in SWET Newsletter No. 125 is doing a “humanizing the quake” series of etegami, prefecture by prefecture.
Saturday, August 23, 2008
Google to offer services for translators?
I first noticed this article at CNET News before the recent Obon holidays, but details seem to have leaked out that would suggest Google is preparing a document translation service that would put people who need translation services in touch with translators who can provide them. Although the service itself is not available yet, it seems to include tools for translating and reviewing documents, managing glossaries, and viewing one’s previous translations, all of which are features typically found in computer-assisted translation (CAT) tools.
Google’s motive for providing these services is not yet clear, but it’s not difficult to imagine that Google would be interested in using the translations stored in this system to improve their automated translation capabilities. Whatever the motivation, if Google’s translation center does come to fruition, it will be interesting to see what effect it will have on sites like proz.com, on translation agencies and other middlemen in the translation business, and quite possibly on the makers of CAT tools like Trados.
Thanks to Philippa Hammond at Blogging Translator for the heads up and to Philipp Lenssen at Google Blogoscoped for more details.
General • News • Noteworthy Finds • Translation • (0) Comments • Permalink
Thursday, August 21, 2008
Japan Image Use Meetings
The North American Coordinating Council on Japanese Library Resources (NCC) International Meeting on Japanese Studies Information Resources is being co-hosted by The UH Manoa Library and the Center for Japanese Studies at University of Manoa, Hawaii August 19, 2008 - August 20, 2008. Participants are representatives from Japan and all over the U.S. mainland. UH Manoa students and faculty in the Japanese studies field and library and information science program will also be in attendance.
SWET reported on the Japan Image Use Conference in Tokyo held on June 23, 2008, in this report published in Newsletter No. 120, now available on the Web site.
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
Ask Haruki Murakami Questions for Time Blog
Time Blog’s 10 questions: “Each week in TIME Magazine and on Time.com, 10 Questions gives readers a chance to put their own questions to newsmakers, celebrities, and world leaders. Check every week for a new guest.” Today Time asked for questions for Haruki Murakami. Go here to ask yours!
Tuesday, June 24, 2008
Yet more editing in restaurants
The Washington Post has a piece up on one writer’s desire to do editing work even while dining out: “Typos a la Carte, Ever A Specialty of the House.” Jane Black writes of her fantasy to take a “distinctive purple pen” to the error-ridden menus in the restaurants she frequents.
Not only did this article connect nicely to my earlier post on the Typo Eradication Advancement League (also mentioned by Black), it taught me a new word: mesclun, “a mixture of young tender greens.” Black has seen this replaced with “mescaline” on more than one occasion, probably thanks to auto-correction in word processing software—the Cupertino effect.
The auto-correct feature is a potentially dangerous line of defense. That mesclun/mescaline problem could be the computer’s, not the chef’s. One mistake I’ve never seen on a menu but would actually savor is the one I lived in fear of when I worked in Boston. Despite my attempts to stop it, my Microsoft Word program would always change the word for Italy’s famous cured meat into what it assumed I meant to type. The night we closed an issue, I would have nightmares that when the magazine hit the stands, one of my reviews would describe “the delicate sweet and salty balance of melon and prostitute.”
Well, at least it was consistent.
(Spotted on Language Log.)
Thursday, May 22, 2008
Guerrilla editing on the road
The Chicago Tribune has a fun story up about the Typo Eradication Advancement League. Jeff Deck and Benjamin Herson spent a few months traveling around the United States, finding and offering to correct mistakes (or, you know, mistake’s) wherever they found them.
Sometimes the people whose shopfronts were marred by these errors welcomed the correction; sometimes they rejected the interference. And sometimes the brave editors performed a bit of corrective graffiti even when they didn’t get permission to do so. One successful rescue began this way:
A block later, they stopped. Outside a clothing store, Deck noticed the lack of an apostrophe in the window type—it read “Women’s & Mens.” They entered, and two clerks with white-blond hair perked up.
“Hi, we’re driving around the country fixing typos,” Deck explained,* “and we noticed one side of your sign out front has an apostrophe and one doesn’t for some reason. So we were wondering if you have a spare apostrophe we could stick in there. Or I could just do it.”
“My, that’s specific,” the first clerk said.
“I’m not sure we keep spare apostrophes,” the other said.
* Really, what editor hasn’t wanted to say this at some point?
Check out the TEAL website for the complete record of the daring duo’s journey. (Spotted on Digg.)
Friday, May 02, 2008
Learn the language, stay a while longer
I just noticed a Bloomberg report on a statement from Foreign Minister Koumura* Masahiko that might be of interest if you’re in Japan on a work visa of some kind. From the article:
The government may expand the period of stay for foreigners who know Japanese to five years from three, Komura told reporters at a briefing in Tokyo today. Non-Japanese who use the language in their work, such as flight attendants, may face easier entry requirements, he said.
“This is to relax regulations, not to tighten them,” said Komura. “We will never deny those who were previously accepted to Japan simply because of their lack of Japanese ability.”
The original text of his statement at the May 1 press conference is on the MOFA website. No word yet on how exactly the Japanese government intends to gauge foreigners’ linguistic skills, but Koumura mentions an “objective test” (?????????????????????????) of some kind as a likely way to do so.
* The FM prefers this romanization for his name, and it’s what I write when I’m doing work for his ministry; Bloomberg’s people have gone with a simpler scheme, though. Romanization wars: a topic for a future post?
Thursday, May 01, 2008
SWET Weblog Starts Today
Starting today and going on for the next six months, a team of volunteer bloggers will be posting here regularly on matters of interest (we hope) to wordsmiths. One of our bloggers, Peter Durfee, has already gotten started; you can read his introductory post here. We hope you will visit regularly and share your ideas on the topics raised in this weblog.
Wednesday, April 30, 2008
Please allow me . . .
To introduce myself, as the song goes. I’m Peter Durfee, and I’m posting this (my first contribution to the SWET blog section; yoroshiku) from Tokyo, where I first came as a high-school student in 1985.
I call myself a translator. Nominally this is what my job description has been for the last 12 years or so, but I’ve been in-house at a company called Japan Echo all that time, which means certain things:
- Early on I spent my time soaking up what I could from more experienced senpai, being more of a student than a translator.
- As time went on I began taking on lots more translation of my own, but the variety of work my company took on meant that I was also handling transcription, interviews, writing from scratch in English, and on-site translation that was almost like interpreting—take furious notes as the VIP speaks and get the gist of his comments on the web as soon as possible.
- In more recent years I’ve become a “senior-class” person in the company, which means I do lots more editing of stuff by younger translators and freelancers we use.
So it’s been a job filled with variety, and today I fit mostly into the E and T parts of SWET.
The Japanese government has always been my company’s main client. Japan Echo magazine, our flagship publication, sees a healthy chunk of its print run bought up by the Foreign Ministry, which distributes copies to libraries and researchers via its embassies and consulates. Most people who have heard of the journal think of it as a Japanese governmental publication as a result, so my business card trips the amakudari alarm when I hand it out to people aware of such things.
We are independent and always have been, though, and given the government’s recent tendency to slash budgets for new projects and cut rates for existing ones (we do white papers and websites and so on that are official .go.jp publications in addition to our own magazines), we’ve been branching out aggressively into corporate work over the last five or six years. This switch in the client base will provide some interesting material for my posts in the coming months, I hope . . . It’s interesting to look at the different demands that clients have with respect to the style of the target-language documents depending on whether they want to make a favorable impression on the Japanese bureaucracy and taxpayers or on potential investors and consumers.
That should be enough for a “howdy nicetameetchya” post, so let’s see if I’ve got the settings right in MarsEdit and try to upload this entry.