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.