New Technology and the J-E Translator
Richard Sadowsky, based on Awajishima, has been in Japan since 1983, an Apple user since 1987, freelance translator for eighteen years, and a member of SWET for about as long. He works in an ever-changing virtual lounge chair, at home and on the road, the experience and expertise for which he shares regularly in articles. A self-described tech geek, the scent of a new technology puts a gleam in his eye and a tingle in his fingertips. Asked about the latest in tech tools for translators, he zeroed in on the top ten, five of which are described here, with the rest to come in the next interview.
Q: What are the first five tools you think essential for today’s plugged-in, highly productive translator?
RS: Well, I don’t know if these will work for everyone, but the way I would classify my tools is into three categories—those that help me: get organized, get comfortable, and translate. Most of the tools I’ll talk about will fall into one category or another naturally. There’s one hidden factor that maybe doesn’t deserve its own category, but is part of using your tools—the ability to get motivated from them. When you like using your tools, from a simple pen to a high-tech gadget, they add that little something extra that will make you more productive with less stress.
Q: Would you like to start right away with tools that help you translate? What electronic dictionaries or glossaries do you never work without?
RS: Eijiro is my first-line tool. It’s available online free, but I always prefer to have the dictionary on my hard drive. It used to be a packaged CD-ROM sold with manual and all, then just a CD-R, now a download. Caveat: you have to go through a complicated signup process with Nifty.com and get subscribed to a mail announcement list that is difficult to unsubscribe from (especially if you lose your NIFTY ID). Still, it’s worth it and I like to get the bigger, better version every year and a half or so. For the Mac I use Eijiro Viewer. What do Windows users use I wonder? (Try saying that a few times fast.)
Q: Now that my tongue is twisted, tell me how you use Eijiro.
RS: I usually copy and paste something into Eijiro first, which is especially useful for finding compounds or phrases, something that other dictionary lookup interfaces don’t often allow. This gives me either an answer or a good start and then I go to other electronic dictionaries, or straight to Google to search for context. In fact, this brings up the question of whether it’s possible to translate without broadband Internet access anymore. It’s hard to go back to that age of looking things up in paper references. Five years ago all one really needed was basic email, but now I find myself turning to the Web for absolutely any question. This, of course, can turn into a major distraction if one is not disciplined. Sometimes I wind up spending 15 minutes looking for a single term. That’s too much time when you’re right in the middle of translating something. I have to learn to just flag something, move on, and come back to it later.
Q:While we’re on the topic of electronic dictionaries, do you use a handheld electronic dictionary?
RS: I’ve owned two in the past (a Canon Wordtank and a Sony Data Discman) and am jones-ing for a new one for the first time in years… the Nintendo DS Lite.
Q: Isn’t that just a game machine?
RS: Thanks to a recent demonstration, I saw that it isn’t. You can buy a cartridge dictionary for it—the Kanji Sonomama Rakubiki Jiten—which is superb. It’s cheaper than other handheld electronic dictionaries, and excels especially in its handwriting recognition, so that you can search by drawing the character! This dictionary just came out in April, 2006. It even has memory quizzes and brain teasers that are great mental sharpeners! And when the Nintendo eventually gives up the ghost in a few years, you still have the dictionary. It doesn’t disappear when the electronics go bad, something that broke my heart with the Canon Wordtank.
The Nintendo DS Lite will set you back about ¥16,800 and the cartridge dictionary is another ¥4,000. Nintendo also has other cartridges, so you can use it for gaming as well, or even WiFi Internet access.
Q: So how much of the Nintendo DS Lite would be for work and how much for play? It sounds like your productive time could be eaten up very quickly.
RS: That’s a good question, and I won’t know until I get it and see. But one thing is for sure—the handwriting recognition will be great for helping remember how to draw characters. If what you draw is not an exact match to a kanji, it gives you a popup selection. After finding what you need, you can then choose from a list of compounds. Because it’s fun to play with, you might just choose a different character to see how it is read or what it means.
Q: What’s next on your list?
RS: How about a Web site that converts Pinyin to English? Does that count? I mean, how often these days do you come across Chinese names that you need to romanize? Especially since you can’t Google them very easily. I just copy and paste into this bookmarked site. It does multiple characters at a time, which is great, but you still have to know where to parse the output. Try this, for example: ????
For the above example, the output is: wen1 zhou1 long2 gang3
You have to parse that into Wenzhou City’s Longgang Town, known as “China’s Printing City.”
And, for Korean place names, another one.
Q: Very helpful! What are other very new, or still most useful, quick-and-dirty online aids for the J-E translator?
RS: Online sites could be a list unto itself, but how about one more for now: Ever forget the word you’re sure you know? Or have a need for a reverse dictionary? Try OneLook.
Q: Using a laptop as your office base, you must have other small devices that make work flow better.
RS: I’m thinking portability here. For concentration purposes: a baseball cap and headphones. A cap or visor will cut down on light that reaches your eyes, 
causing less eyestrain. If you like to listen to music while you translate, headphones are a great investment. If you want to get technical, noise-canceling headphones are even better for blocking out other sounds while you work. I’ve been using a pair of Sony MDR-NC5 headphones for years now, and though they sometimes put too much pressure on the ears, they work as advertised. (There are many types of noise cancelling headphones available these days, including ear canal types.) When you can’t control the external environment, at least you can block it out.
Q: What is third on your list of “never start without”?
RS: Don’t all those links in the first question count? Okay. Number three is backup. You know the truism—there are two kinds of computer users: those who back up their data and those who haven’t lost any data yet. For a Mac user like me, this means an external Firewire drive, because a USB 2.0 drive is not bootable. I have a couple of 3.5-inch desktop drives, but I’m thinking a 2.5-inch portable might be a good investment. These smaller-footprint (2.5-inch) drives cost about the same for 80 GB as about 250 GB 3.5-inch drives these days (as of August 2006), but if you’re going to be traveling overseas for any substantial amount of time, you have to take one with you. Then, I use SuperDuper for my backup software.
Q: Is everything you use high-tech? Or are there any garden-variety items that help boost productivity?
RS: Believe it or not, a copy holder is an essential piece of equipment. In the stationery section of Tokyu Hands they sell do-it-yourself copy holder pieces. These are snap-together pieces of plastic in different shapes and sizes. I clip mine onto the edge of my laptop screen and it brings the paper closer to my eyes. For a desktop copy holder I use a simple Carl C-55E that they call a “genkō-dai.” For ¥300, you can find one in the Konan home centers. But these days I’m receiving a lot of PDF files and for viewing those, a large flat-panel monitor is an excellent piece of equipment. Prices have come down as quality keeps going up. You can get anything from 19 to 24-inch for ¥30,000 to ¥74,000. One of these is high up on my list of next office improvements. But you have to go to a store like Yodobashi camera and do a sight comparison for yourself when it comes to buying a monitor. I’d like to get people’s recommendations.
Q: You filled us in on the “fab four”; what’s the fifth translator tech tool to round things off this time?
RS: A portable text-input device that is smaller than a notebook computer and has much more battery life. I have used an Alphasmart Pro, a Psion Series 5 (one of my favorites), and currently a very retro Palm IIIx with GoType keyboard that I bought used several years ago, but still works with Mac OS X up to System 10.4 because of Palm Desktop 4.2.1. The idea here is to have some kind of keyboard device to type into (for speed, it must be touch typeable, so no thumb keyboards) that you can take with you somewhere and work on when either you don’t want to carry a computer or there won’t be enough battery life for extended periods of time. So you might even get a good deal on a used Palm at an online auction, or get one from a friend that is still in good shape, and then you can go really portable.
Richard, you given us some ideas to spruce up our work area for speed and comfort. We’re looking forward to the next group of five-best items for the tech-enchanced translator!
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