MATTERS OF STYLE

In general, follow the Chicago Manual of Style, 16th edition (CMS16). For spelling and hyphenation, follow Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th edition. For style issues specific to material relating to Japan, see rules below (reference: SWET, Japan Style Sheet; hereafter JSS). Matters in question not detailed here will be resolved by the editor in consultation with the author and the SWET Editorial Team.

Spelling and Punctuation

• Use U.S. punctuation and spelling (reference: Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th edition).
• Use the serial comma.
• Use only one space after terminal punctuation (periods, question marks, and exclamation marks).

Article Titles and Subheads
Use the headline style of capitalization (CMS16 8.157) for article titles and subheads. Long articles should have two or more subheads to break up the text.

Numbers

• Spell out numbers from one through ten; use numerals for 11 and up. This applies to both cardinal and ordinal numbers (nine pencils; the 12th edition).
• Use numerals for percents (50 percent). Do not use the symbol % in running text.
• Spell out ages (he was two; fifteen years of age); and ten-year age brackets (in their twenties). 

Japanese Words

• Use the old Hepburn system of romanization (use the “n rule”; see JSS).
• Italicize Japanese words that are not defined in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 11th edition.
• Do not italicize proper nouns.
• Do not italicize individual Japanese words or phrases that are marked off from the text already by quotation marks. (You have “kare” used in the Japanese. Who is kare?)
• Macrons are used to indicate long (extended) vowels. Authors should input macron vowels where needed in the text. Mac users may input from the keyboard using the U.S. Extended keyboard or from pop-up menu of diacritical characters (Lion 10.7 and up); Windows users should copy/paste macron vowels using Character Map. See JSS update article for details.

Japanese Names
As a rule, use Japanese name order, surname first, followed by given name, using the Hepburn system of romanization: Suzuki Yasuko. However, respect a person’s preference for given-name-first: Yasuko Suzuki; or for Kunrei system of romanization: Yasko Sudzuki.

Decades and Centuries

• Spell out decades (in lowercase) or use figures followed by an “s”: the twenties or the 1960s (not ‘20s, ‘60s).
• Spell out centuries rather than use superscript feature (nineteenth-century prints; a twenty-first-century technology).

Names on Second Mention
In write-ups of activities, etc., use a surname alone (with no courtesy title) or a full name in referring to a speaker or an individual e.g., Adachi said, or, Barbara Adachi said (not Barbara said).

Abbreviations
U.S. as an adjective, United States spelled out as a noun.
The abbreviations “i.e.” and “e.g.” should always be followed by a comma.

Special Handling

• Use curly or smart quotation marks, not straight quotation marks (reserve for inches/feet; min./sec.).
• Capitalize “the” when it is the first word in the title of a book (CMS16 8.161) but use lowercase “the” when citing a periodical (CMS16 14.179), except when it is at the beginning of a sentence (e.g., “We cite The Chicago Manual of Style and the New York Times.”). Do not capitalize the “The” of formal titles of organizations in running text (She works for the Asia Foundation.). But, when giving an address, do capitalize “The” (The Asia Foundation, x-x-x Minami Aoyama, Tokyo).
• Spell “email” as one word, no hyphen.
• Do not include http:// or ftp:// in URLs unless “www” is not the first item, i.e., http://monumenta.cc.sophia.ac.jp
.
• Spell “website” as one word, lowercase, but capitalize Internet, World Wide Web (three words), and the Web.
• Capitalize and italicize the word “Newsletter” when referring to the SWET Newsletter as simply the Newsletter.
• For a.m. and p.m., type in lower case with periods; for text intended for print, use small caps.
• For capitalization in titles, refer to CMS16 rule 8.159.  (Translation Issues in Twenty-First Century Japan).
• “SWET Kansai” (without quotation marks) is the correct name for this branch organization.

Submitting the Manuscript
Please query the editor about a submission.

• Please always submit manuscripts as digital files and send by email as an attached RTF or MS Word document. When only physical copy is available, please contact the editor for assistance with inputting.
• Reprinted material from newspapers, magazines, etc.: send the reprint as an email attachment, not as text pasted into the body of an email message. Send a hard copy of the text by post (the quality of faxed material is not adequate for proofreading). The original is essential for the proofreader.
• When submitting Japanese text, send as an email attachment, not as text pasted into the body of an email message. Send a hard copy of the original text by post or fax.

Copyright License
The acceptance of a manuscript for publication by SWET grants SWET the right to publish on its website and occasionally in print publications. Copyright remains with the author and appears on the publication as

©  Year-of-First-Publication Name-of-author

Reprinting Copyrighted Material
Permission for use of previously published (copyrighted) material should be cleared with and obtained in writing from the author or original publisher before submitting articles. This includes, for example, Japanese text being reprinted or used for sample translation purposes, English text being reprinted, or photographs or other graphic material.

Permission request forms are available as Microsoft Word documents; please contact the SWET editor, and online as an Excel spreadsheet version.

PREPARING MANUSCRIPTS FOR DESIGN/LAYOUT

This section is primarily a tool for Editorial Team copyeditors and others who handle manuscripts in the final stages of the editorial and proofreading process.

Text Format

• Margins should be unjustified (i.e., ragged right,  also called “align left” in Microsoft Word).
• Font size should be set at 12 points and line height at 18 points (not double- or 1.5-spaced).
• The copyright sign, the copyright date, and the author’s name appear at the top of the article for the copyright notice.
• An introduction of 30–50 words containing the keywords of the article and highlighting its attractions should be written and placed after the title, as it will appear in the first text seen by visitors to the website. If not provided by the author, this text should be prepared by the editor. 
• Articles should not begin with a subhead, i.e., a subhead cannot appear between the title and the first paragraph of text.
• Leave a one-line space between the title and the body text; also leave a one-line space above subheads. 
• Paragraphs are indicated by an open line. Do not indent paragraphs, using spaces or tabs. 
• Ordinary roman, i.e., not italicized, text should be entered in a Latin-alphabet (English-language) font or as hankaku if an Asian version of Microsoft Word is used. Italics should be indicated by italicizing the text.

Special characters

• Enter standard European-accented characters from the keyboard, e.g., vis-à-vis, résumé. For macrons and other diacritics, see above.
• M dashes may be entered from the keyboard (—) or represented by two hyphens (—); in either case, no space precedes or follows the dash. N (en) dashes may be entered from the keyboard (–); in either case, no space precedes or follows the dash.
• Single and double quotation marks should be entered from the keyboard (as curly or smart quotes), not straight quotes.

Graphics
Authors are encouraged to supply images to accompany their text. Please consult with the SWET editor regarding choice and format of images and where they should be sent.

Specifications for image data:

• For a book cover and page from a book: a full-color scan, grayscale mode, TIFF format, 50 percent size of the cover, 300dpi resolution.
• For an illustration or comic: a comic can be scanned at 100 percent of size depending on the original size. Also, if the illustration has been done digitally, the original vector art is preferable.
• For a photo (color or b/w): TIFF or JPEG format. Check with editor about the images if the article is intended for print publication.
• Credit/copyright notices and suggested captions should always be included.

Copyeditor’s Checklist for Finalizing Manuscripts for Publication
✓ Final draft has been checked by author.
✓ Permissions for use of all copyrighted material, text, or illustrations are on file.
✓ Correct copyright notice is provided.
✓ Introductory.
✓ Author’s name is included.
✓ Text beginning after headings is flush left; remaining paragraphs are indicated by open spaces.
✓ Double spaces are removed.
✓ If long text has no subheads, two or three are added. (There should never be only one subhead under a heading.)
✓ Credits and captions are provided for photos.

Japanese to English Translation

• Of Eggs and Accents: Translating Kawakami Mieko, by Alison Watts

• March 11, 2011: Continuing Stories
  • Already a Year—Only a Year, by Ginny Tapley Takemori

• SWET Events
  • Journeying with J-Boys: Kazuo’s World, Tokyo 1965, by Avery Fischer Udagawa
  • Stories from Inspiration to Publication, by Suzanne Kamata
  • Writing in Japan: Publishing Alternatives, by Alex Shishin

• From the Steerage
  • Our Story in Print: The SWET Newsletter 1 to 130
  • SWET’s New Online Look, by Richard Sadowsky
  • Japan Style Sheet Updates
  • Kanji in English Text
  • Macrons and Other Diacritics

• Book Reviews
  • Translating Translation: David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear, by William Wetherall
  • Hasegawa’s Course in Translation, The Routledge Course in Japanese Translation, by Deborah Iwabuchi

More details . . .

Japanese to English Translation

• Of Eggs and Accents: Translating Kawakami Mieko, by Alison Watts

Alison Watts reviews lessons she learned about literary translation while tackling Chichi to ran (Breasts and Eggs) by Kawakami Mieko at the Summer School Workshop held by the British Centre for Literary Translation in July 2011. This article is based on a presentation given at a conference organized by the Japan Association of Translators in Nagoya, November 2011.

March 11, 2011: Continuing Stories

• Already a Year—Only a Year, by Ginny Tapley Takemori

Translator and book editor Ginny Tapley Takemori writes how the triple disaster that hit eastern Japan last year connected her in unexpected ways to her local community in Tsukuba, Ibaraki prefecture, and to a community in Ishinomaki, Miyagi prefecture, that was devastated by the tsunami. While volunteering in the reconstruction effort, she has been impressed by how survivors have found the strength to pick up the pieces of their shattered lives with warmth and humor. “It has been a defining experience in my own life,” she says.

SWET Events

• Journeying with J-Boys: Kazuo’s World, Tokyo 1965, by Avery Fischer Udagawa

Shogo Oketani, author of J-Boys: Kazuo’s World, Tokyo, 1965 (Stone Bridge Press, 2011), and his wife, Leza Lowitz, spoke to members of SWET and SCBWI Tokyo on December 6, 2011. Avery Fischer Udagawa, the translator of J-Boys, joined via Skype in the exchange, which was moderated by Holly Thompson at the Wesley Center in Minami Aoyama, Tokyo. The conversation traced the development of J-Boys from linked stories in Japanese for teens and up to a novel in English for middle grade (upper elementary) readers. Udagawa reflects further on the education the project afforded her in middle grade historical fiction. 

• Stories from Inspiration to Publication, by Suzanne Kamata

Suzanne Kamata spoke to SWET Kansai on September 11, 2011, about writing, editing, and publishing short stories using her own experience. She discussed how she comes up with ideas for her short stories, and suggested how aspiring writers might come up with their own; how she selects markets for her work; and how she found (and lost and found again) a traditional publisher for her work. Her collection, The Beautiful One Has Come, won a Silver Nautilus Award and was a winner for best short story collection in the Next Generation Indie Book Awards.

• Writing in Japan: Publishing Alternatives, by Alex Shishin

Describing experiences with publishing fiction and nonfiction over three decades, Alex Shishin’s March 11, 2012 Kansai SWET talk recalled the opportunities available to writers in Japan during the print-dominated era and the new conveniences and opportunities now available via the Internet. Shishin is a professor at Kobe Women’s University, where he teaches literature and writing.

From the Steerage

• Our Story in Print: The SWET Newsletter 1 to 130
• To mark the publication of the 130th issue of the SWET Newsletter, and the transition to new means of information sharing in SWET, members of the Editorial Team contributed to this Q&A about the Newsletter’s past and present. We hope this exchange will both add to the record of an era in SWET’s history and help readers appreciate the professionalism and sense of mission of the many volunteers and contributors over the years since the first issue was published in 1981.
• SWET’s New Online Look, by Richard Sadowsky

This year SWET enters a new era with a redesigned and enhanced website at swet.jp setting the groundwork for SWET’s future development. From now on, the website will be the place to go for SWET news, articles, and information for members and others with an interest in SWET topics. The launch is currently planned for the end of June 2012.

Japan Style Sheet Updates

Editors, translators, and proofreaders turn to the Japan Style Sheet (Stone Bridge Press, 1998) in making style decisions for their work related to Japan. While the editorial options and recommendations given in JSS are as reliable as ever, technology has moved on, resolving some of the difficulties regarding inclusion of kanji and macrons (long-vowel marks for romanized Japanese). This article updates the JSS on “Using Kanji in English Text” and augments and corrects the advice on long vowels in “Macrons and Other Diacritics.” Copies of the Japan Style Sheet are available at discount from SWET by contacting info@swet.jp.

Book Reviews

• Translating Translation by William Wetherall

Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything, by David Bellos. (New York: Faber and Faber, 2011). viii + 373 pages.

• Hasegawa’s Course in Translation, by Deborah Iwabuchi

The Routledge Course in Japanese Translation, by Yoko Hasegawa. (London: Routledge, 2012). ISBN 978-0-415-48686-6. Price ¥4,092).

Some may have seen the New Year’s TV program showing the tsuikidoki craftsman who takes a flat sheet of copper and over three days to a week beats it into a gracefully shaped teapot, complete with spout, using only a hammer, a high-piled rack of toriguchi forming tools, and the accumulated experience of two or three decades (reference here). The completed work is functional, durable, beautiful to look at, and comfortable to hold in the hand. A work of polished craft is honest work indeed.

For those of us who think of ourselves as wordsmiths, the work of the tsuikidoki craftsmen strikes a recognizable chord. Like them, we have our “forming tools” (though they can’t be hung on a rack to show off to visitors), and we have our years of accumulated experience that tell us how to get a grip on our materials and how to aim our “hammers” to get the desired results. And yes, it can take a week to refine a manuscript from its original material to the polished, crafted work that we call our product, but the result will long communicate its message in print or on the Internet, quoted, paraphrased, and reforged by others for years to come.

Thinking about this model of craft and professionalism is encouraging as we return to our routines in the New Year.

In 2012, SWET starts its thirty-second year. SWET exists because many people who work with the English word in Japan wear more than one professional hat—we may translate, write, edit, proofread, develop copy or captions, compile indexes, offer advice about design, guide the layout of tables and charts. We are charged with getting a grip on words and shaping them in the desired form for a desired purpose, and are paid to do it skillfully. And beyond that, we build bridges between cultures.

Tasked to cover so much professional territory, we can benefit not only from collaboration with each other, but also from the experience of those who have done these things before us. SWET is a repository of that experience, both in its archives and in the living body of its membership, a valuable repository to tap and to build upon.

SWET’s website is in the process of being redesigned, but SWET has to redesign itself as well. The membership is shifting. SWET was founded by wordsmiths who worked predominantly with the printed word and who were accustomed to face-to-face interaction and networking. Today is an era of Internet-based communications and social media, e-books, websites, and “cloud” computing. What will SWET be in this era? Who wants and needs it? What will it do? How will it operate? These are questions that members with initiative and a sharing impulse will answer, and we hope that will include you.

A spirit of information sharing and mentoring has driven SWET and its activities since its founding. We hope that spirit will be carried on, giving what we do enduring value and a heightened presence in a world that needs the right words and good communication more than ever.

Lynne E. Riggs

The SWET Newsletter is going to change. As announced in No. 128, the present Newsletter will continue through No. 130, to come probably in February or March. After that, the new incarnation of the Newsletter will appear sometime in 2012, as part of our redesigned website (details on which see below).

Preparations for these changes have been going on for more than a year. At an October 8, 2011 meeting of a small group of SWET members, it was proposed that the Newsletter should become more bulletin-like and that it should be published primarily on the website instead of in print. Most of the online material would be in brief form (short articles, notices, reviews, event announcements, reports, etc.), with the general information made openly available and some longer pieces or details reserved for dues-paying members. The content would be authored by any interested SWET member or even non-member, and edited and proofread by editors volunteering on a rotating basis.

At the same time, we agreed we did not want to totally abandon the substantive articles and event reports that we have been publishing especially since 2004. That original and distinctively SWET content is probably the biggest benefit of being a SWET member for many in our scattered group.  Our solution: why not publish such articles online, and then collect those of enduring value for publication in a print annual to be sold for profit? Subsequent discussion on the Steering Committee and Newsletter Committee mailing lists essentially brought consensus.

Although we now agree on where we want the Newsletter to go, we still need your help to make things happen. The exact form of the new publication (e-zine, printable, searchable PDFs, etc.) has yet to be determined, and those interested are invited to contribute to the discussion by joining the Newsletter Committee (SWET-NC).

The Newsletter is also looking for a new name. Suggestions so far include Transactions of the Society of Editors, Writers, and Translators (TSWET), SWET Journal, Proceedings of SWET, and SWET Offline, but we are still looking for better ideas.

Finally, we welcome contributions of all kinds to the final print issue of the Newsletter. Help us commemorate this landmark with your story, insights, and your professional experience.  SWET, after all, is only what its members make it.

New SWET website

In September 2011, the Web Design Committee asked a professional designer to redesign the SWET website. The Steering Committee has delegated decisions about the redesign to the “active team” for web design and maintenance, which is led by webmaster Sako Eaton; his assistant for the redesign, Richard Sadowsky; and manager of updates and new content, George Bourdaniotis. Other members of the WDC including Hugh Ashton, Neil Ramsay, Lynne Riggs, and Fred Uleman have also volunteered to support the effort.

The main objectives of the website redesign are to:

• improve the look and function of the site
• make it easy to find by wordsmiths of the SWETerly kind
• make it easy to use by wordsmiths, with separate sections for editing, writing, and translating, and a good search function
• facilitate the public sharing of SWET expertise
• provide a blog-like news page for event notices, topics of interest, and brief reports
• make selected articles and guidelines provided by SWET easily available to interested professionals (both members and non-members)
• offer longer “proceedings of SWET” articles as they are generated, and archive past SWET Newsletter issues in PDF format for dues-paying members
• maintain SWET administrative data, such as membership information, to facilitate dues payment and serve members

The site map has been discussed and revised several times and is now in its final form. The WDC reviewed the design proposals in January and the new site will open by early spring 2012.

Once this happens, volunteers will be needed to help prepare material, populate the SWET blogosphere, and otherwise enrich the site. We hope all SWET members will consider participating in building up the site as a new means of networking and accessing information for their professional needs.

Volunteers in charge of core SWET functions change hands

SWET is run by a group of core volunteers who oversee the vital tasks of the organization. The posts of general secretary, treasurer, and membership secretary have rotated several times during SWET’s 30-year history, and this year they changed for the first time in a decade. The new volunteers are as follows:

Membership secretary: Kevin Cleary
Treasurer: Imoto Chikako
General secretary: Lynne Riggs

A special thanks to our old officers, Neil Ramsay, Bob Poulson, and Naomi Otani, for ten years of dedicated and efficient service!

In the wake of the March 11 disaster in the Tohoku region, many of us have wondered whether SWET is still needed and relevant. But as long as there are professional wordsmiths working with or related to Japan, the benefits of networking with other professionals and tapping the accumulated resources built up by members over the past several decades will be important reasons for keeping our society alive. We look forward to your involvement and support.

SWET Steering Committee and Newsletter Committee

SWET Calendar

SWET Events in 2011

Originally published in the SWET Newsletter, No. 129, November 2011.

Updated for web publication January 5, 2012.

In an efficiency-first, high-tech world, will human translators soon be transformed into skilled slaves? We bring to the task of translation understanding and consciousness, exactly what both rule-based and statistically based MT translation lack, and the completeness of our understanding becomes the measure of what we do. Karpa recalls the history of reading text when there were no spaces between words (scriptura continua), a laborious task sometimes assigned to slaves. He cites studies illuminating how different parts of the brain are mobilized for reading ideographic characters and alphabetic characters. He discusses the processes involved in reading and understanding, mobilizing complex components and functions of the brain. By understanding how we understand, we can transcend the slave. Author of Translating in the Deep End (The ATA Chronicle, American Translators Association, Alexandria VA, Jan 2011), Michael Karpa is a long-time Japanese-to-English translator based in San Francisco, California.

Translators—human translators—have often greeted the prospect of computer translation with naked fear. Will we be out-competed by efficient machines, as so many professions have? We love the productivity-boosting Web, home of online dictionaries, search engines, and even translation memory tools, but Web-based statistical machine translation, which essentially catalogs the translation labors of the past, is making tremendous strides. Perhaps our days are numbered.

But not so fast. Against this mechanical efficiency, human translators offer “understanding.” In a recent article, I speculated that the way translation forces us to demonstrate the completeness of our understanding could instead increase the value of what we do.¹ A growing body of evidence suggests that intensive exposure to the Web is impairing our cognitive abilities: to read, to understand, to think.² The general idea is that the decision-making the Web demands (whether to click links or not) overloads our working memory, the part of the brain that holds the information we are using at the moment, preventing it from forming those links to other information, experiences, and emotions that occur when we engage in creative thought. Translators are practiced in drawing constantly on inference, knowledge, and experience to understand a source text. This could be the greatest skill that translators have.

If understanding matters, that is. If it is possible to translate without understanding, the eventual reign of computers over all but the most celebrated works of art seems assured. So I sought to find out more about what it means to understand, what happens in the brain when we do, and if that could help explain why Japanese-to-English translation is one of the language combinations in which computer translation has been, so far, among the least successful.

How Does the Brain Translate?

The essence of translation is reproducing as complete an understanding as possible in a different language. What does that entail in terms of brain function?

Let’s say I am going to translate a sentence. First, I look at my text, a simple workaday source text:  データベースの検索手順を次の図に示します. I say to myself, it’s Japanese. Then I read it. Well, actually I scan it first to get a feel: データベース, 手順. It’s a familiar subject, instructions about software. I can read it fluently and just take in the meaning. It refers to something that is next, a figure, so I look at the figure. I see how long the procedure is, who does what. It is time for a test translation. I disengage from Japanese and switch to thinking in English. Database. No, procedure should come before database. No, search procedure. A database search procedure, or a procedure for searching a database. And a next figure, which is shown there. So that’s what it says: The database search procedure is shown in the next figure. My translator experience rejects this as too Japanese, too faux-English. The next figure shows the database search procedure. Or is it the following figure, or the figure below? Is it shown or illustrated or depicted? I decide: The following figure shows the procedure for searching a database. Is it the database? I have to read a bit more for that one, both before and after my text. A database it is.

データベースの検索手順を次の図に示します
The figure below shows the procedure for searching a database.

That’s a lot going on for one short, simple sentence, and yet I do this all the time, nearly automatically, usually entirely unaware of the process. I identify the language, switch into that language, arrive at an understanding, refine that understanding, and test my understanding by checking contextual information. Once I feel I have an understanding that is accurate enough to build on, I switch languages to start testing translations. I try on subjects and objects, transitive and intransitive verbs, passive and active voices, refining and again checking the language for contextual appropriateness and register. I put down my favorite version and move on, knowing I’ll look at it again later purely as English, without engaging the Japanese at all.

Where in the brain does all this occur? Is it in working memory, that part of the brain so overloaded by the Web? Theodore Zanto describes working memory as a cognitive action that allows us to keep information temporarily in mind after its source is gone, and to manipulate it as well, which is the widely accepted model proposed by Alan Baddeley.³ When I translate, I am certainly doing this. Reading the Japanese loads the sentence into my working memory, where I keep it refreshed by deliberate attention, a process called “rehearsing.” I do this using a part of working memory called the central executive, which establishes and maintains goals and has been identified with the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. In fact, I have been engaged far more deeply than I would be simply deciding whether to click a link. The central executive of my brain has been performing repeated executive tasks—switching languages on, switching them off, ordering words to be produced, associating information, and generating thoughts. Assuming the Internet hasn’t hopelessly clogged up my dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, I appear to have been engaging in creative thought.

How Do We Read?

In translating, that process begins with reading, which in turn begins with recognizing graphic symbols as meaningful. Reading is not innate to the human brain. It is a skill that must be painstakingly taught and learned. Reading stories from picture books amazes young children with adults’ ability to reproduce a story, time after time. Repetitive readings of rhythmical, rhyming verses also stealthily introduce children’s growing minds to the idea that words are composed of phonemes—discrete auditory units. This lays the foundation for reading: the recoding of graphically recorded phonemes, regardless of orthography, into speech and language.

But writing did not begin with phonemes. The first event in the dawn of writing was symbolic representation (numbers on clay tokens), the second was the insight that symbols can represent words, and the third was that symbols could correspond to sounds.⁴ The earliest evolving orthographies—hieroglyphics, cuneiform, Chinese, and Zapotec—were logographic, representing words using graphic symbols. These graphs were originally independent of sound, but soon came to do double duty, representing words in some cases (logographs) and sounds in others (syllabaries), just as the kanji precursors of kana did (奈 evolving into な). These writing systems were logosyllabaries, composed of both logographs and phonetic symbols, as well as characters with features of both (think 清 and 請⁵).

Early logographic and logosyllabic writing systems were extremely time-consuming to learn and, therefore, the domain of only an educated few. Such systems had far fewer characters than today, so characters served multiple roles, which required notations to mark the particular role a character was serving. The complexity was reminiscent of Japanese written in 漢文, with its 訓点, 返り点, 句読点, and so on. Alphabets were a democratizing invention, but their initial absence of vowels still meant considerable skill was required to read. Even after the Greek invention of vowels, reading was arduous because there were no spaces between words, a style of writing called scriptura continua, which Paul Saenger describes in great detail in, Space Between Words: The Origins of Silent Reading.⁶

A key technique, one readers still use today, made this possible: reading aloud. The difficulty in reading without spaces is that words are tough to identify. (This is also, crucially, a reason given for the failure of machine translation and translation memory programs to optimally translate Japanese or Chinese into alphabetic languages: the lack of spaces in Japanese and Chinese makes words hard to identify.) So how did humans read the unseparated stream of scriptura continua? They had to scan back and forth, reading syllables aloud to assemble an understanding. Physically pronouncing ambiguous phonemes helped readers keep them in mind until the larger words and sentences became clear. This is true in early learning of modern Japanese as well. According to Takahiko Sakamoto and Kiyoshi Makita, kana imposes a heavy burden on young readers by making them reconstruct words from phonetic signs that offer no distinction between words boundaries. “To aid the young Japanese reader, group oral recitation is essential.”⁷

Ninth-century translation into Syriac of a Greek medical text by Galen. Written in scriptura continua.

There is a reason why reading aloud works: one of the four parts of working memory is based in sound. Alan Baddeley’s model of working memory is that of three slave components supervised by a central executive: a phonological loop in the left (language-dominant) hemisphere, a visuo-spatial sketchpad in the right hemisphere, and an episodic buffer. The phonological loop holds auditory memories. These decay rapidly unless rehearsed (repeatedly articulated within working memory). The visuo-spatial sketchpad stores visual information (form and color), deals with spatial and movement information, and likewise rehearses information. The episodic buffer helps integrate visual, spatial, and verbal information with time sequences, such as memories of stories, and is linked to long-term memory and semantic meaning. This information is then transferred to the central executive.⁸ Back in the days when translators used multiple, heavy dictionaries stored on shelves, many of us used a trick to cut down on reaches to the shelf: when looking up two or more Japanese terms, say the first English translation aloud to keep it in memory while looking up the second (which you then remember visually). Without knowing it, we were taking advantage of the phonological loop to rehearse the first term while loading the second into the visuo-spatial sketchpad.

In his landmark Reading in the Brain, Stanislaus Dehaene gives an elegant summary of how the brain turns written symbols into language in the reading process.

Written word processing starts in our eyes. Only the center of the retina, called the fovea, has a fine enough resolution to allow for the recognition of small print. Our gaze must therefore move around the page constantly. Whenever our eyes stop, we only recognize one or two words. Each of them is then split up into myriad fragments by retinal neurons and must be put back together before it can be recognized. Our visual system progressively extracts graphemes, syllables, prefixes, suffixes, and word roots. Two major parallel processing routes eventually come into play: the phonological route, which converts letters into speech sounds, and the lexical route, which gives access to a mental dictionary of word meanings. ⁹

With unseparated text, it was impossible to do this in silence. The eyes also had more to do. In reading, they move from stop to stop (fixations) in a series of jumps (called “saccades”). Without spaces to mark out the words, ancient readers needed more than double the number of fixations and saccades we do today. Ancient readers “also required a quantity of ocular regressions for which there is no parallel under modern reading conditions in order to verify that the words had been correctly separated.”¹⁰

Reading was inefficient and laborious. It was work. The notion of reading for pleasure or for reference was unknown. More typically, texts were “performed” by professionals. The difficulty of reading scriptura continua resulted in the delegation of reading and writing to skilled slaves.

The medieval introduction of spaces into Latin and Greek scriptura continua (first in Ireland, then England, and then the European continent) created the possibility of fluent reading, since a major part of the work was already done for the reader. Word order was also becoming more important. Highly inflected classical Latin did not place importance on word order, except for metrical and rhythmical eloquence, much as the use of particles in Japanese allows phrases marked by particles to be moved with some freedom within Japanese sentences. At the end of the Imperial Roman period, however, word endings were increasingly not being pronounced, which obscured inflections and made sequence more important in Vulgar Latin (unwritten or colloquial Latin). Word order began to follow fixed sequences. This helped make silent reading possible, which made reading easier, and thus more efficient.¹¹

In Japanese and Chinese, a “lack of spaces” clearly does not impede reading. Saenger remarks that, indeed “many skilled adult Chinese readers are able to achieve a proficiency in rapid, silent reading perhaps unequaled in modern Occidental languages.” Dehaene notes that the greater density of characters in Chinese results in shorter saccades (jumps of focus).¹² Individual characters function much more like words than letters, so the eye does not need to jump around as much. The way kanji and kana are combined helps readers of Japanese pick out separate words. A transition to kanji from kana frequently marks the beginning of a word, so the reader is not forced to sound out phonetic elements and identify each and every word through a hypothesis-test procedure.

The result in both cases is silent, automatic reading, which is mentally much more efficient. Now that I as the translator have phonologically recoded the orthography efficiently into language (that is, I have read the Japanese sentence), I rehearse it in working memory. Next comes the fun part: I switch languages and reproduce my text in English.

The Bilingual Brain

So how do brains work with multiple languages? There is no simple answer. Bilingual brains may have two different types of structures. One functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study from 1997¹³ suggested that early bilinguals (in this study, those exposed to two languages from infancy) produce both their languages in the same part of the brain, but that late bilinguals may use distinct regions for the dominant and second languages. In late bilinguals, semantic processes may play a greater role than phonological processes.

A 1999 study by Cathy Price, David Green, and Roswitha von Studnitz¹⁴ of language switching and translation (of single words only) explained that the bilingual brain has a “bilingual lexico-semantic system” that processes the look (orthography), sound (phonology), and meaning (semantics) of words in the dominant language and the second language. Price and colleagues made PET scans of very proficient German-English adult bilinguals while they were translating or reading words in German, English, or alternating languages. (Their German subjects learned English as their first foreign language at a mean age of 8.8 years and were fluent in English for a mean 9.8 years at the time of the experiment.)

In their work, they used the Inhibitory Control (IC) model of Green,¹⁵ which holds that language task schemas exist for each language. (A schema is an organized pattern of thought or behavior stored in long-term memory.) The schemas are external to the language system. A schema in the dominant language (say, a model for word production) will compete dynamically with a similar schema for the second language. To say something in the second language, you must inhibit the schema for the first. When you switch between languages, you inhibit the active schema and activate the other (previously inhibited) schema.

Price and colleagues found that when people switched languages, the areas of the brain that were activated were associated with phonological recoding, not semantic processing (turning written language into sound, rather than meaning).

I have noted in my own translation practice that translation sometimes flows nearly effortlessly. Other times, complex grammar, ambiguity, or unfamiliar subject matter slow me down. For the tougher sentences, I may return from intense concentration on my unfinished test translation in English only to find the Japanese original newly impenetrable. The harder I work creating a translation hypothesis (and the later in the day), the harder it becomes to switch. To get back in the Japanese groove, I may subvocalize or read aloud. The Japanese snaps into focus. It seems I have given phonological recoding a nudge.

Price and colleagues noted that psycholinguistic data emphasize two different routes for word translation: a direct route that links words at the syntactic level and an indirect route that links them by meaning. Their study found that translation increased activity in some regions involved in the control of action, though surprisingly not in the dorsal prefrontal cortex, possibly because of the high proficiency of the subjects. Perhaps with experience, single word translation becomes automatic. Nicholas Carr notes in his well-researched exploration of how the Web may impair deep reading, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, that scans of experienced users of search engines show that they make use of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex during search activity whereas inexperienced users do not.¹⁶ So perhaps experienced translators can leave their dorsal prefrontal cortexes free to be clogged by links.

In short, the Price et al. study confirmed that switching and translation use different parts of the language system. Translation uses semantics and articulation, language-switching uses phonology. The authors proposed that during translation the demands on articulation increase because the response to the input orthography must be inhibited while the response associated with the translation equivalent is activated.

This helps explain several issues with “word seeding,” the practice of globally replacing complex technical terms in a source document with their target-language translations. This step can help ensure terminological consistency, a sort of do-it-yourself translation memory program. I do this on occasion. It does free one from having to look up the same obscure term multiple times, or having to return to previous sections to see how you translated it before. And it prevents confusion when there are two very similar but crucially different terms. However, in practice I have found it sometimes counterproductive, because the seeded words do not seem to “function” with the words still in the source language. A perfectly good English adjectival phrase, comfortably settled in the form it will take in the final translation, nevertheless fails to modify its still-Japanese noun because the Japanese noun demands the features of a Japanese adjectival phrase. The two languages are in different schemas, which don’t always mingle easily. Or rather, if they are going to mingle, both must be obeyed, much as a bilingual might say in a conversation with other bilinguals, “it wasきれいだった.” Word seeding may also feel inefficient because of the switching costs of going from language to language. With word seeding, I may also lose confidence that the final translation is what was really meant because the original source term disappeared early on.

This problem turns up when translating with translation memory programs, as well. Statistical machine translation and translation memory programs have no real schemas. For these programs, language is not actively functioning. It obeys no rules. Rule-based machine translation, which codifies grammar, has paradoxically proven unsuccessful in actual translation. It lacks the huge store of experience a human mind contains, and semantics consequently elude it.

The strong role of semantics and articulation in translation may explain how we translate obscure or technical kanji terms we have never heard spoken and can’t confidently pronounce—unexpected mixes of 訓読みand 音読みabound. In the absence of phonology, semantics carries the day. I have often felt there was a semantic route for kanji, a sort of 英読み to take me directly from the logograph to the target language.

Philippa Jane Benson¹⁷ examined a landmark 1979 Stroop¹⁸ study by Biederman and Tsao that highlighted this idea. Biederman and Tsao compared Chinese and English Stroop interference and found significantly greater Stroop interference in Chinese subjects than in native English speakers. They speculated that Chinese readers may automatically process logographs by their configurations whereas readers of English use abstract rules to turn graphemes into sounds. They cited the widespread belief that Chinese characters provide more direct access to meaning than English words.¹⁹ But more recent research strongly indicates that reading of Chinese characters always involves phonological mechanisms, whether the reader is aware of them or not. In her study of Japanese acquisition of kana and kanji, Virginia A. Mann noted that, “phonetic representation is employed in the service of temporary memory and comprehension whether subjects are reading the English alphabet . . .  or the Chinese logography.”²⁰

When I watch myself carefully, I realize that often as not, when I am reading a Japanese kanji phrase that I have never heard in use, I am either using a straightforward 音読み or, when desperate, pronouncing it in Chinese. (I studied Chinese for several years before starting Japanese, but have not kept it up.)

Dehaene notes that reading of both alphabetic and logographic writing activates the same area of the brain, which he calls the letterbox. Modern brain imaging has clearly established that, “in spite of geographical distance, different imaging methods, brain morphologies, education strategies, and writing systems, brain activations related to word recognition in Chinese readers lie only a few millimeters away from those of English readers.” Dehaene also notes that strokes that impair the letterbox affect reading of both kana and kanji in Japanese readers. However, there is more to language than the letterbox. Words written in kana and kanji do not activate the brain in identical ways. In rare cases, a stroke patient may retain the ability to read in one script but not in the other.²¹ The areas of the brain used for phonological processing also differ considerably between Chinese and English,²² and reading of characters makes extensive use of the right hemisphere, which alphabetic languages largely do not.

The key areas of difference for reading characters and alphabets are motoric memory and right hemisphere cortical regions. In addition to the semantic and phonological areas of the left hemisphere, reading of characters also recruits the visual-spatial system on the right hemisphere, which Li Hai Tan and colleagues have attributed to the need to analyze the square field of the character and determine the spatial locations of the brush strokes that comprise it.²³ Motoric memory is involved because Chinese and Japanese (and Sumerian) children learn (or learned) hundreds or thousands of logographic characters through years of repetitive writing in established stroke order. Mann describes her experience researching memory of graphic designs: “During testing, I noted that, unlike American children, many Japanese children attempted to trace the designs on their fingers or even with a motion of their head.”²⁴

Reading in three languages: The brain uses different areas when reading a syllabary, alphabet or logographs. The approximate location of Dehaene’s “letterbox” (visual word form area) is also shown. Diagram by Michael Karpa, based on Maryanne Wolf’s diagram in Proust and the Squid, p. 62.

Maryanne Wolf includes a figure illustrating the different areas of the brain activated while reading English, Chinese, and kana and notes that, unlike alphabetic writing systems, logographic characters require the involvement of right hemisphere areas known to contribute both to spatial analysis and to more global types of processing.²⁵

Understanding Understanding:  The Conscious Translator

In translating Japanese to English we make use of semantics (meaning) and articulation (our ability to produce language), as well as motoric, visuo-spatial, and phonological memory. One thing that sets the human species apart is our frontal lobe. Humans have much more connectivity in our prefrontal neurons than other primates, we receive more incoming inputs, and we have many more synaptic contacts. We have one form of neuron, the giant fusiform cell, than we share only with other great apes. The extremely long axons of these neurons connect the frontal lobe to other distant regions of the cortex. Dehaene has proposed that this creates a “global neuronal workspace.” The prefrontal cortex is less specialized than most of the cortex but is connected by these giant fusiform cells to specialized areas throughout the brain. According to Dehaene, the main function of this “neuronal workspace” is:

to assemble, confront, recombine, and synthesize knowledge, … guided by any combination of information from past or present experience. Our prefrontal cortex, thanks to its connections to all the high-level areas, provides a space for internal deliberations fed by a whole set of perceptions and memories. Bluntly put, what we term “conscious thinking” may simply be the manipulation of information within this global neuronal workspace.²⁶

Is this something that computers cannot reproduce? After all, our biological capabilities remain phenomenal: the total storage capacity of all the world’s computers is about the same as the DNA of one human, and the maximum number of instructions per second that all the world’s general computers could execute (in 2007) was equivalent to the maximum number of nerve impulses that one human brain can execute per second.²⁷ And computers do not have motoric memory, visuo-spatial, or phonological systems. At least, not yet. Odds are good that they will someday be able to reproduce a global neuronal workplace. Rule-based MT has not been as successful as statistical MT, but it may yet find its purpose as a kind of language-task schema married to statistical MT, which will serve the role of long-term memory under a yet-to-be-invented central executive. If nothing else, science is showing us that—marvelous, complex, and flexible though it is—the brain is understandable. In an interview available on YouTube, Alan Baddeley says:

Consciousness is a way in which evolution has equipped us with a tool for pulling together information and allowing us to reflect on it and use it in order to plan for the future. . . . The episodic buffer . . . allows information to be combined, bound together from many sources . . . within a system that can stand above it and reflect on it and perhaps even reflect on the reflection. So, I think of consciousness as a biological function, a function that we’re starting to understand.²⁸

In a sense, if we ask what is the value of a human translator, we ask what is the value of consciousness. Consciousness, the ability to reflect on our thinking, should someday be creatable. What our ability to understand really offers is the ability to choose what we do with our consciousness. It is up to us as individuals how good a job we do as translators, or as anything.

The advance that resulted from introducing spaces into scriptura continua was not speed, but efficiency. It freed our minds to think as we read. The greater efficiency of automatic, silent reading allows associative memory to function even as we read. To the recorded words we add our own associations, memories, and emotions, generating new thoughts of our own.

Making the task of translation easier could also create mental room for new associations, new thoughts, and greater creativity, allowing us to produce better work. As a translator today, I wonder, could the rigid norms of translation memory programs actually lead to an increase in neurophysiological efficiency similar to that which occurred with the switch to silent reading?

At the moment, I sense not. Or at least, not yet. MT cannot translate on its own; it can only skillfully retrieve the work done by translators in the past. Franz Och, the head of Google’s machine translation team, has said Google’s “algorithms basically mine everything that’s out there.”²⁹ With so little regard displayed for intellectual property rights and, by extension, the value of an individual translator’s work, one might be forgiven for feeling that the skilled slave is an alternative model of the future of the translation profession. But uncertainty remains innate in language. We cannot predict what will happen between the beginning and the end of a short sentence, so translators have to be conscious. Our ability to stay conscious and present and to bring our wealth of experience to bear is what keeps us from becoming slaves. In the future, we may have another way to view a real computer translator, when it finally arrives: not as a tool or a competitor, but as something evolving into a collaborator, whose consciousness can work in tandem with our own profuse and unpredictable ability to think.

About the Author:
Michael Karpa is a long-time Japanese-to-English translator based in San Francisco, California. He has a master’s degree in international policy from Stanford University and was a visiting professor at the Monterey Institute of International Studies Graduate School of Translation and Interpretation in 2002-2003. He is the translator of Sakaiya Taichi’s What Is Japan and his fiction and essays have been published in Faultline and a number of other literary magazines.

(Originally published in the SWET Newsletter, No. 129, November 2011)

• Japanese to English Translation
  • Slave to the Word, Michael Karpa

• March 11, 2011: Continuing Stories
  • After March 11: A Magazine and Local Newspaper Respond to the Disaster, Terri Nii
  • The Silent Citadel: Poetry for 9/11 and 3/11, Higashizono Tadatoshi

• SWET Events
  • Orchards: Holly Thompson on Japan in Fiction for Teens, Ann Tashi Slater
  • Joan Ericson on Japanese Children’s Literature, Lynne E. Riggs

• From the Steerage
  • SWET Business Update: Looking Ahead

• Book Review
  • Tidbits among the Triumphalism, Charles De Wolf

More details . . .

Japanese to English Translation
• Slave to the Word, by Michael Karpa

In an efficiency-first, high-tech world, will human translators soon be transformed into skilled slaves? We bring to the task of translation understanding and consciousness, exactly what both rule-based and statistically based MT translation lack, and the completeness of our understanding becomes the measure of what we do. Karpa recalls the history of reading text when there were no spaces between words (scriptura continua), a laborious task sometimes assigned to slaves. He cites studies illuminating how different parts of the brain are mobilized for reading ideographic characters and alphabetic characters. He discusses the processes involved in reading and understanding, mobilizing complex components and functions of the brain. By understanding how we understand, we can transcend the slave. Author of Translating in the Deep End (The ATA Chronicle, American Translators Association, Alexandria VA, Jan 2011), Michael Karpa is a long-time Japanese-to-English translator based in San Francisco, California.

March 11, 2011: Continuing Stories
• After March 11: A Magazine and Local Newspaper Respond to the Disaster, by Terri Nii

Terri Hogue (Nii) arrived in Kokura (Kyushu) from California in 1980 on a one-year teaching contract, where she saw notices of SWET meetings in the Japan Times (which arrived in “overseas” Kyushu one day late). After study, marriage, relocation, and incorporation, she joined the industry, and has been engaged in writing, editing, and translation activities for the past 15 years, based in Fujisawa. Currently editor of Eye-Ai magazine and a Shonan-based freelance writer, Nii recounts how two different publications that she is involved with decided to present information related to the March 11 disaster.

• The Silent Citadel: Poetry for 9/11 and 3/11, by Higashizono Tadatoshi

“Unbelievable” was the apt and ubiquitous word following the disaster now called “3/11.” Two unexpected and heartening things happened, one was the waves of compassion that rolled from around the world; the other was the outpouring of poetry in the 31-syllable (5-7-5-7-7) waka (tanka) and 17-syllable (5-7-5) haiku forms, which continues, even now. Translator Higashizono Tadatoshi draws our attention to the way human sentiment takes flight at times of crisis. 

SWET Events
• Orchards: Holly Thompson on Japan in Fiction for Teens, by Ann Slater

Holly Thompson’s first novel, Ash, was set in the shadows of Mt. Sakurajima in Kagoshima, and her most recent work, Orchards, is a young adult novel that traces the experiences of a half-Japanese girl in a coastal mikan-growing community in Shizuoka. How does Thompson write convincingly and sensitively about life in a culture not her own? And how—in the case of Orchards—does she interweave cross-cultural issues with difficult teen themes such as suicide and bullying? Through untiring research, collaboration, and revision, is the answer she gave at her June 10, 2011 talk for SWET at the Wesley Center in Minami Aoyama.

• Joan Ericson on Japanese Children’s Literature, by Lynne E. Riggs

The earliest literature identified as having been expressly written for Japanese children dates from the 1870s and 1880s. One thread was played out in the textbooks, reading material, and songs used in the modern schools established after 1872. Another emerged from the ideals and the pens of Japan’s modern writers—inspired by the romanticism and naturalism of the worlds of literature and art in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth century—who went on to write the stories now considered “truly modern" Japanese children’s literature. In her July 9, 2011 talk in Kyoto, Joan Ericson, professor of Japanese literature at Colorado College, wove a tale of the “discovery of the child,” the idea of the “pure and innocent” child, and the role of women in the shift to a more realistic conception of the child. Joan Ericson is translator of Hayashi Fumiko’s Hōrōki (as Diary of a Vagabond), and the author of Be a Woman: Hayashi Fumiko and Modern Japanese Women’s Literature (1997).

From the Steerage
• SWET Business Update: Looking Ahead

The SWET Newsletter in its present form will be published through No. 130 (March 2012). The SWET Web Design Committee is in the process of having the SWET website redesigned with a view to opening the new site in early 2012. SWET thanks Naomi Otani (general secretary), Bob Poulson (treasurer), and Neil Ramsay (membership secretary), for the long years of faithful service to SWET and welcomes their successors to these positions: Lynne Riggs, Chikako Imoto, and Kevin Cleary, respectively. This column includes a list of SWET Events in 2011.

Book Review
• Tidbits among the Triumphalism, by Charles De Wolf

Globish: How the English Language Became the World’s Language, by Robert McCrum. (New York: Penguin Books, 2010). ISBN 978-0-141-02719-4. Price ¥1,944.

Reviewed by Misa Dikengil Lindberg

I first came across Toshiya Kamei’s A Fox’s Window and Other Stories while performing a random Google search for “Awa Naoko translation.” I was surprised and excited to find this collection of Awa Naoko’s children’s stories, most of which are appearing in English for the first time. 

Awa (1943–1993) is a beloved children’s literature writer in Japan who received numerous literary prizes in her lifetime. Mostly unknown abroad, Awa has been compared to Beatrix Potter and Hans Christian Andersen as a writer of modern fairy tales. Her stories, usually set in an undefined era in rural Japan, intriguingly mix the everyday life and emotions of children with a magical world of nature that is both wonderful and frightening. In Awa’s world, animals, flowers, and trees speak, mountain and sea witches are a reality, and spells turn seagulls into children. Readers are compelled to rethink the complicated relationship between humans and nature as foxes, cranes, and magnolia trees indelibly touch humans’ lives with poignant moral lessons. Sweet and haunting, Awa’s stories delight both adults and children.

Toshiya Kamei was born in Japan and studied English and Spanish in school. He received an M.F.A. in literary translation from the University of Arkansas, and his translations have appeared in literary journals and magazines, mainly in the United States. In addition to The Fox’s Window and Other Stories, he has translated from Spanish a collection of modern short stories by Liliana Blum entitled The Curse of Eve (Host Publications, Inc., 2008). In the opening translator’s note to The Fox’s Window and Other Stories, Kamei writes that he selected thirty of his favorite Awa stories from childhood. The result is a wonderful collection that spans Awa’s three decade-long career, with classics such as “The Bird,” (Tori), “The Long Gray Skirt” (Nagai haiiro no sukāto), and “While the Beans Are Cooking” (Hanamame no nieru made).

The translated collection is wonderful-looking, too, with a gorgeous cover illustration by Amane Kaneko and three black-and-white illustrations included in the text. I couldn’t help but wish, however, that the editors at UNO Press had handled this text more carefully, so that Awa’s stories could have been impeccably represented in more natural English.

“The Long Gray Skirt” is a haunting tale in which a girl sees her younger brother kidnapped and turned into a pigeon by a woman in a gray skirt. Later the girl is told that her brother had drowned and everything she witnessed was merely a figment of her imagination, the result of spending a frightening night in the forest alone.

Unfortunately the magic of the story often vanishes because of poor or inadequate editing of the translation. On page 70 a passage is accidentally repeated: “Then I burst into tears. Fear ran through my body, and I burst into tears.” On page 75 the word cherry is mistakenly written as cheery (“‘The horse?’ I had seen him in a cheery forest. ‘I saw him eating cherry blossoms,’ I said.”) 

Other instances of pronouns without antecedents, unclear tenses, and missing or incorrect articles and prepositions abruptly remind readers that they are reading translated text. On page 69 a definite article is used in front of bush although a bush has not yet been mentioned in the story (“As the path bent around the river, he disappeared behind the bush”), leaving the reader wondering, “What bush?” On page 72, はっときがついたとき is translated as “When I realized it,” without any antecedent for “it”: そして . . . はっと気がついたとき、ながい灰色のスカートのふもとにぺしゃんと、すわっていました becomes “When I realized it, I sat by the long gray skirt.” This sentence also illustrates the toll of tense confusion in Kamei’s translation. I’m not sure why すわっていました isn’t translated as “was sitting,” as this would make it clear as to whether the girl suddenly found herself sitting by the skirt or she intentionally sat down near it, upon realizing that she had been running for a long time. Something like “Suddenly I realized I was sitting right at the hem of the long gray skirt” might have worked better.

This same confusion between the past and past progressive occurs a number of times. あの木のうしろに、修は、かくれているのかもしれません。それとも、そのまたむこうの、こんもりした雪のかげで、息をころしているのかもしれません。私がちかづくと「うわっ」と、とびだして、おどかすつもりで becomes “Maybe Osamu was hiding behind one of the trees, I thought. Maybe he stayed in the shadow of a snow chunk. When I went closer, he would surprise me” (p. 72). Translating the second sentence, like the first, into the past progressive would have been much clearer. Perhaps something like “Maybe he was hiding in the shadow of a snowbank and would jump out and surprise me as I got closer.”

Undoubtedly it is difficult to translate some of the conversational, story-telling qualities of Awa’s writing into smooth English. Kamei omits many conversational elements of the narration such as そしてandじゃありませんか. Of course it is not necessary to translate every word directly from Japanese into English, and sometimes Kamei simplifies masterfully. There are some places where Kamei’s renderings of Japanese expressions into English are impressive. For example, 胸が凍りました becomes “my heart froze with fear,” and（たべられる、たべられる）と、心にくりかえしながら smoothly becomes “‘I’m going to be eaten!’ I screamed inside my head” (p. 72). It is in lines like these, where Kamei boldly reconstructs Awa’s words in natural, believable English, that his translation shines. 

In other instances, however, Kamei’s simplification comes at the cost of Awa’s elegant descriptions. All Japanese-English translators know the difficulty of translating giongo (onomatopoeia) and gitaigo (mimesis) into English. While it is perfectly common to omit these rather than bog down the text with wordy translations, Kamei wisely keeps some where the writing would not have worked otherwise. For example, in “First Day of Snow,” Kamei preserves the rhythmic quality of some rabbits’ hopscotch chant 片足、両足、とんとんとん as “One foot, two feet, hop, hop, hop” (p. 149). In other instances, however, the beauty of Awa’s writing is lost when the paring down of adverbial expressions fails to evoke the beauty of the original writing. In “The Large Magnolia,” どのリボンにも、きれいにアイロンをかけて、くるくると巻いて、小夜は、大事にしまっているのです is flatly translated as “She ironed them, rolled them, and kept them in the box” (p. 219). Here readers lose the image of Sayo, the main character, meticulously ironing the ribbons and carefully tucking them away in her box, as if they were the most important ribbons in the world. Later in the same story, the spirit of a magnolia tree asks Sayo to rub the tree trunk, and she responds thus: 黙ってうなずいて、片手で木の幹を、いっしょうけんめいこすってみました。そうして、てのひらが、ひりひりしてくるころ、朴の木の幹はうっすらと、すきとおってきて . . . Here readers are given only “she nodded in silence and began to rub the trunk. When her palm began to hurt, the trunk became transparent . . .” (p. 222). I wish readers could instead have seen Sayo rubbing “the trunk with all her might. And just as her palm began to sting with pain, the trunk became transparent . . .”

A final detractor in The Fox’s Window and Other Stories is awkward or incorrect English. In “The Large Magnolia” we read that “[Sayo] felt the pecking sound echo her body” (p. 221) when perhaps it should be that the sound echoed within her body. A few pages later, the sentence “Stared by a pair of green eyes, Sayo nodded” (p. 224) sounds like poorly translated English with its missing preposition. 

Without a doubt one of the charms of Awa’s writing is its storytelling quality. I understand, however, that much of it could be difficult to relay in English. In the original Japanese, characters’ thoughts are sometimes set off in parentheses, sometimes not, and at times the narration trails off in ellipses as the main character is left bewildered or questioning his/her own thoughts. Kamei was smart to wrap quotation marks neatly around characters’ thoughts, give them clear attributions, and omit trails of ellipsis points in parentheses that would be confusing in English.

Lastly, it is not clear whether this book is intended for scholars, fans of Japanese literature in translation, or the average American child—and perhaps it doesn’t matter. But if this were a publication intended to introduce Awa’s stories to American children, I would wish it contained a simple glossary to explain Japanese terms. Currently Japanese words such as susuki, chanchanko, uchikake, and furisode are used in the text without adequate explanation. A glossary might make the book more child- and even classroom-friendly.

Toshiya Kamei has nevertheless done a tremendous service in translating Awa’s stories and getting an entire collection published by the University of New Orleans Press. Hopefully The Fox’s Window and Other Stories will spark American readers’ interest in Awa’s writing and pave the way for more translations of her work to come.

The June 25, 2005 SWET on Saturdays featured three veteran editors of English in Japan presenting the perspectives of freelance editing, editing of translations, and book editing to 23 working and aspiring editors. The presentations by Phil Ouellet, Lynne E. Riggs, and Ginny Tapley included stories from their experiences, general advice about editing in Japan, and specific pointers basic to all kinds of editing.

The idea for this event grew out of two experiences of one of the organizers, one at a conference in Kyoto about a proposed network of editors and translators for Japanese scholars and public intellectuals (see SWET Newsletter No. 109, pp. 9–16), and another in a meeting of the three panelists with a senior researcher at the National Institute of Research Advancement in Tokyo. On both occasions Japanese scholars expressed complaints about native-speaker editing that they could tell had been done poorly or insensitively. Although we are accustomed to editors complaining about authors, and translators complaining about ill-written original Japanese texts, some Japanese clients who require editing are increasingly discriminating and appreciative of high standards of English, and complaints like these are a wake-up call to those who offer their services as editors of English text in Japan. The aims of this event were to find out what editors working in Japan know and do not know, share the experiences of veteran editors in various fields and outline the qualities, practices, and habits cultivated by good editors.

Three Ways Into Editing

The three panelists represented different branches of the editing field as it can be found in Japan, and their stories illustrate the diversity as well as the common threads shared by professionals in this field.

Phil Ouellet

Speaking about his background, Phil Ouellet recalled his undergraduate days at a small liberal arts college where writings skills were stressed in all departments, including the sciences, both soft and hard. The head of the economics department, for example, was so insistent that students write well that his policy was to allow only one “unpunished” error of punctuation, spelling, or grammar per assignment, with the grade being lowered one full level for each additional error (e.g., from “A” to “C” if three errors). Concerning his subsequent law school education, Ouellet noted that although many lawyers are not good writers in some respects, they almost always are precise. After law school, his training in writing was put to good use in government jobs, first in land-use planning/zoning, and then in personnel/budgetary administration for the Los Angeles City Attorney’s Office.  

Ouellet first came to Japan in 1986, for the last three months of a one-year stay in Asia. He returned here late in 1988, after winning the grand prize in a lottery: free round-trip Los Angeles–Narita airplane tickets. His good fortune continued when early in 1989 a college friend who owned an advertising/copywriting company in Tokyo and who had seen Ouellet’s written work assigned some overflow work to him on a trial basis. That worked out well, and he was introduced to one of the firm’s clients, Simul International, then the premier translation/interpretation company in Japan. He began doing freelance and in-house editing for Simul in a wide range of fields, especially law, government and politics, and business/finance/economics, but also in medicine and various academic and semi-technical fields. While working in-house at Simul, Ouellet saw the kind of high-quality work that a dedicated team of professionals (Japanese and native-English translators, Japanese translation checkers, and native-English editors) could achieve. 

At this point in his presentation, Ouellet showed samples of the numerous and varied written materials he has worked on during his 16 years as an editor in Japan: corporate annual reports and other business/economics materials; publications of religious and quasi-religious groups; medical publications; academic papers and newsletters for the Tokyo Foundation; and several books, including Japan and the United States—Fifty Years of Partnership and The Inugami Clan (fiction). Because Ouellet’s work has increasingly resulted from recommendations by satisfied employers and clients, he stressed the importance of contacts and recommendations in obtaining work in Japan, where they are perhaps more important than in other countries.

Ouellet now works mainly freelance, while maintaining one part-time in-house position at a patent law firm. His work for the firm initially involved checking letters sent to law firms overseas, but it gradually expanded to include the editing of patent specifications and other documents, facilitating relations with clients and foreign law firms, and representing the firm at international conferences overseas. He noted that this is one example of how editing can lead to other types of work.

Lynne E. Riggs

In thinking what led her to a career working with words, Lynne Riggs said she often recalls her high school English composition teacher under whose unhesitating red pen she got her first hard lessons in the rules of writing. That start, supported by college-level courses in expository writing, turned out to be invaluable when it came to the discipline and creativity needed for editing and translating: to compose good topic sentences and concise conclusions, insist on just the right word, strip out “dead wood,” get around word repetition, double-check punctuation, recast sentences, find alternative expressions, and other skills.

During her undergraduate junior year abroad and a subsequent year of independent study in Tokyo, Riggs supported herself by the tried-and-then-truly lucrative means of teaching English. Returning to Tokyo after graduate school she soon learned the market value of an M.A. in Asian Studies and sought work using her still-beginner Japanese, typing skills, and brief experience with newsletter editing and layout. A fortuitous introduction led to a job as typist for the English-language journal, The Japan Interpreter, whose staff was led by master J-E translator and translation editor Kano Tsutomu. Kano and his colleagues were devoted to translating articles and books from Japanese and to what is now known as “developmental editing,” aiming at the highest standards of writing for English publications in Japan. For the first two or three years, Riggs’ main job in those pre-word processor days was to retype drafts for the more experienced editors and translators. Her aspiration to become a translator herself evolved as she observed her colleagues correcting each other’s work and collaborating to produce high-quality text. Later graduating to editing and translating, she continued working for Kano’s Center for Social Science Communication until 1990. The Center’s tradition stressed collaboration between Japanese and English native-speaking professionals. “Our salaries were low, we worked late nights and weekends to meet deadlines, and we struggled with stubborn clients and over-confident authors, but we had each other to lean on,” she related, and the effort paid off in the trust and confidence of clients. In 1990, Riggs and one other staff member started an offshoot company of their own that specializes in semi-academic, non-technical translation and editing of books and periodical publications. Working part-time on commission, Riggs became managing editor in 1997 at Monumenta Nipponica, the scholarly journal of Japanese studies published by Sophia University, under the leadership of editor Kate Wildman Nakai. [As of 2009, Riggs retired from MN, and is editor and translator at her own company, the Center for Intercultural Communication.]

Riggs, who was involved with the founding of SWET in 1980, recounted how important the friendships and professional associations with other SWET members have been to a career in wordsmithing in Japan, where work in different professions frequently overlaps.

Ginny Tapley

Tapley arrived at editing by a rather different route than Ouellet or Riggs, having come from a background as a live music promoter in London. In addition to organizing, this involved writing publicity material and press releases, as well as the occasional review. At the end of the 1980s, Tapley felt she had had enough of the music business and, on an impulse, decided to move to Spain. She spent a few years as an English teacher there, studying Spanish and Catalan, and eventually became fluent enough to start translating. She worked for a small but professional translation company, where all translations were peer checked before being sent to the client. “They liked me,” she recalled, “because I was good at the conceptual stuff that nobody else wanted—art and literary reviews full of high-blown rhetoric and flowery turns of phrase that required a good deal of imagination in order to be able to understand them.” While being able to make sense of such texts, she fell into all the usual translation traps awaiting beginners, but the agency fortunately returned all translation drafts to the translators covered with the red ink of corrections so that they could learn from their mistakes. “That was the best possible education,” Tapley said, “and I learned much about translation from them.”

Tapley began taking on freelance work from other clients, one of whom was a literary agent. The agent began asking for translations of book blurbs and reviews, and after a while the requests included writing book summaries and publicity material. This led eventually to a job as an agent, and Tapley spent three and a half years working mainly in foreign rights—that is, selling the translation rights to books. “But I still had the language bug,” she recalled, “and it was around this time that I made several Japanese friends in Barcelona and was becoming interested in Japan.”

In the midst of an office move, she dusted off a pile of novels translated into English from Japanese, took them home to read, and became intrigued. Her boss agreed to let her take over the representation of those books, and she did manage to make some sales in Spanish and Catalan. Deciding that she wanted to learn Japanese, she left her job and Spain, “not without regrets after seven very happy and productive years,” and went back to London to enroll in an undergraduate program in Japanese at the School of Oriental and Asian Studies (SOAS), London University.

The SOAS course was four years of intensive study, with the second year spent at Waseda University in Tokyo. In addition to language, she studied classical Japanese, classical and modern literature, and art, reveling in the luxury of study after years of laboring in the working world.

To support herself, she continued working for a literary agent (mainly assessing manuscripts), writing book reports for a literary scout, editing for a Spanish artist, and also working as a medical secretary for a well-known children’s hospital. In 2002, keen to return to Japan upon completion of her course, she received a recommendation through her contacts in the literary world to Stephen Shaw at Kodansha International. Much to her surprise, her application was quickly acted upon, and she was offered a job as editor at Kodansha International (KI).

Since then she has been learning a new side of the publishing world—that of making books. KI is a small enough company for editors to be involved in every stage of the process. “We are more like project managers, or producers, than many people would understand by the word ‘editor.’ We have to initiate projects, gain company approval, negotiate contracts, write the contracts, develop the project, search for and gain permissions for any illustrative material, commission authors, translators, proofreaders—and yes, editors, too!”

In book editing, the single most important aspect, says Tapley, is to have a clear grasp of the overall vision of the book. This applies to in-house editors, of course, but also to outside editors, too. This is a behest worth bearing in mind for any editing project, at whatever level one is editing. “You must have a clear vision of the subject, the style, and the target audience, and adapt the material at hand to that purpose. If you are working closely with authors or translators,” she advised, “you must communicate closely with them to ensure you all share that same vision.”

If asked to provide advice to young, aspiring editors (or translators) now, Tapley suggests they be prepared to become an expert on every job they do: “Read up on the subject. Study. Research every word and don’t leave anything to chance. When starting out, you do not have the luxury of being able to only accept work that you are really interested in or that is well paid—that is a luxury that you may only gain with age and experience, and a measure of luck.” When starting out, she says, an editor should give the utmost to every job, regardless of whether it is for-pay or not. If you do a good job, you will gain the respect of the client, and more work will eventually come your way. Also important is learning to communicate with authors and translators. “While respecting their opinions in the way you would like them to respect yours,” she says, “you should not be afraid to challenge them if you think there is a mistake.”

[Note: Tapley has been a freelance editor and literary translator since 2006.]

Freelance Editing

Ouellet outlined the benefits of freelance editing. A freelance editor can work as an individual or incorporate as a business. Because Japan’s individual income tax laws are quite liberal, many expenditures, including newspaper subscriptions, book/magazine purchases, ISP charges, transportation, rent, telephone, gas, electricity, and meals with others in the writing field can be at least partially written off as business expenses. Another benefit is flexibility concerning schedule and workplace. For example, Ouellet typically is away from Tokyo for about two months each year, including several week-long retreats at a Zen temple and at least one visit to the U.S.A. This would be impossible with a regular full-time job. He’s been able to select the clients he works for, keeping only those who will accommodate him in this way. Though he is not interested in full-time in-house work, he strongly recommends holding a part-time in-house job for the sake of income stability.

Ouellet also mentioned some of the disadvantages of working freelance. To begin, one’s workload (and hence income) can be unpredictable and highly variable, so that to have only freelance work is not advisable for one who becomes anxious in such situations. He also noted that a client dissatisfied with a freelance editor’s (or translator’s) work for any reason (good or bad) usually will not express any complaint but will just stop sending work. Ouellet said this may be due to the Japanese cultural reluctance to criticize anyone directly. He also warned that some translation companies, usually small ones, sometimes try to squeeze extra work out of editors and translators for no pay, such as by requesting proofreading or layout-related tasks that are beyond the original scope of a work assignment. One must therefore consider ahead of time whether to include such tasks as part of a job or to insist on extra pay for them.

Other disadvantages of being a freelancer are that some companies view one not as a human being but as a resource, like a telephone or fax machine, available for use at virtually all times, with the result that they don’t hesitate to call late at night, requesting that work be done immediately. Even without such calls, one’s work likely will often include rush jobs, so that one must work late at night (sometimes even all night) and on weekends and holidays. To minimize such problems, Ouellet recommends screening non-worktime incoming phone calls before answering them, never giving out one’s cell phone number to clients, and being as selective as possible about potential clients.

Ouellet noted other practical considerations, including the importance of having backup equipment—two computers, two phone lines, two printers, and so on—because a freelance worker cannot risk being unable to send or receive work if the primary equipment fails.

Ouellet recommended that before agreeing to accept work an editor should determine what level of editing the client wants and reach agreement as to the amount to be paid. In setting rates, it is important to consider the type of document to be edited (e.g., an article for an engineering journal and a speech require different types of editing) and what level of editing the client wants or is appropriate for the type of document (a proposed law requires a much stricter level of editing than a business letter, for example). Other considerations include the quality of the writing being presented for editing, how many revisions or checks a client requires of a document, and whether non-editing work such as layout is required.

It is important for the editor and client to agree from the start about the basis for charging for work, whether according to volume, which is the usual basis, or according to time. Freelancers are typically paid by the “page,” a term whose meaning must be agreed upon by the client and editor for rate-setting purposes. A “page” typically consists of 200 to 250 words (as counted by MS Word or other standard word processing program), though occasionally a client will want to use a character count as the basis. Ouellet recommended that an editor be cautious when a client says, for instance, “We have a five-page document. Will you edit it for ¥5,000?” Each “page” might have very narrow margins and be in a 10-point font, totaling the equivalent of 15 200-word pages. Also, a client might want to pay according to the number of pages or words in the document after editing, even though, Ouellet says, this is almost always disadvantageous to the client, because if an editor is lazy or greedy the final product probably will be wordier than it should be. Occasionally a freelancer may be paid to edit on an hourly basis, but this is usually the case only after the client and editor have established a long and stable relationship and mutual trust.

Sometimes a client might want to set price for an entire book or other document. In order to be safe, one should examine the entire document and determine how much time and effort it will require before submitting an estimate or accepting the client’s pay offer. For both setting a fee and negotiating a deadline, Ouellet recommends adding 10 percent or so to the amount of time one thinks that a project will take, because probably more time than expected will be needed. In his experience, a longer text usually takes less time to edit than multiple shorter documents having an equivalent total number of pages, because of the need to process more files, to become familiar with new subject matter and so on, and thus it might warrant a lower per-page rate. Other factors in setting rates include the length of time until the deadline and how much work the client provides on a regular basis. Ouellet generally asks a new client what it wants to pay, and he accepts the amount if it is at all reasonable, with a view towards adjusting rates upward if necessary as the relationship progresses. Ouellet also noted that some clients in Japan tend to delay payment for three to six months, and so he recommends reaching an agreement as to payment date before accepting a job.

For Ouellet, two other considerations are also very important in deciding what work to accept and what rate to request or accept: the degree of interest in the subject matter; potential conflicts with personal ethics.

In addition, said Ouellet, self-discipline and the ability to work alone are essential for a freelancer, for reasons that should be obvious. A freelancer also must be able to politely turn down work that because of time limits or other considerations one cannot do or does not want to do. Otherwise one can easily end up working 20 hours a day and being underpaid, especially because recently there has been much pressure in Japan to reduce rates. However, one must exercise care in this regard, because if a freelancer too often declines work from a client, the client will stop offering jobs.

Many Japanese clients, Ouellet observed, do not know English well and are not able to distinguish between good and bad English writing, and often they don’t want to pay for what it takes to make that difference in terms of product. Also, some clients resist change and tend to repeat the same errors in publications year after year, sometimes because no one wants to admit that a mistake has been made. Often this is a matter of wanting to keep things the way they have been to avoid admitting that previous work had shortcomings, which would imply criticism of whoever had done that work.

Sometimes a client wants a literal translation, but the best translations are almost never word for word, said Ouellet, and they might vary considerably from the language and structure of the original. Good translations sometimes result from making explicit that which is vague or ambiguous, but in some cases Japanese texts are intentionally imprecise for some specific reason. For instance, a statement might need to be vague so as not to embarrass someone, to keep options open, or to allow for various interpretations. Moreover, in business and political writing, vagueness might be intentional.

Care must be taken to ensure that both the editor and the client know what the client expects. For example, says Ouellet, a client might ask an editor to give a paper a “light check.” If the client’s definition of “light work” is not clarified, the editor might do a highly polished job only to find that the client is unsatisfied, declaring that the tone has been changed too much.

Editing Translations

Another field of editing focuses on texts translated from Japanese. This is the type of work most familiar to Riggs, who works in a small firm that specializes in the humanities and social sciences and stresses the collaboration of Japanese and non-Japanese translators and editors. Most of its work is currently the translation of Japanese texts as well as editing and proofreading for English-language books and periodicals.

The main feature of this kind of editing is the necessity of combining knowledge of Japanese and translating skills with editing, both of the “developmental” kind (which may involved heavy rewriting, recasting, reorganization) and of the technical, copyediting type (needed at the stage of preparing manuscripts for typesetting and publication). While some editors prefer not to see the Japanese text as they work, a great deal of the editing of translations cannot be done accurately without having at least some reading ability and willingness to refer to the Japanese.

Especially when working with translators with limited experience, or with Japanese translators rendering texts into English, the drafts may have syntactical or organizational problems that are difficult to unravel without reference to the original. There is considerable demand for persons who have both translation and editing skills, although the work is hard and time-consuming.

Since the editor’s job in these situations is to turn draft translations into publishable articles or other texts, invariably other tasks are involved. Some of these are the following:

• Looking up background information to clarify references or contexts
• Tightening repetitive passages, adding introductions and conclusions
• Choosing pull-quotes and writing captions or other blurbs
• Reducing the number of headings
• Editing the headings (which are often too long and complex if literally translated)
• Finding the original text for passages from English sources
• Getting permissions for extended quoted material
• Finessing parts of the text that are awkward, inappropriate, or unnecessary
• Making indexes

In Japan, clients often look for skills requiring a managing editor, one who can regulate the succession of tasks involved in producing a multi-author publication (either book or periodical)—translation, checking, editing, copyediting, author-checking, collation of corrections, and first and second proofreading—and make the various judgments needed along the line for English material. Since the client often expects the professional to work according to procedures and schedules determined by its organization, this can require advanced Japanese-language skills and familiarity with work practices in Japan.

Another kind of work that comes under the rubric of “editing,” is revision of badly translated texts, as when the client has been told by someone trusted that the English in a document “needs to be fixed.” Riggs has received numerous jobs of this kind, often translations presumably already done for good pay but so badly that the work has to be done over. The conditions of such work are almost always poor—lower rates and short deadlines—but careful, dedicated work on a pinch project of this kind can lead to future work under better conditions. Such cases are usually the result of not choosing the right kind of translator for the work in question. One consolation might be that some parts of the initial draft can often be salvaged.

An increasing number of clients for editing in Japan, Riggs believes, know English quite well and can tell whether the professionals they hire are skillful. They do not want an editor who simply corrects the verb agreement and article usage; they know how important it is to enhance the expressions, improve the level of language, and give their text an idiomatic, natural English tone that will make their message effective. So the light-handed editor who makes only minimal changes is not necessarily what the client needs.

Editors often need to educate clients about the nature of good J-E translation and how best to present their information in English, whether as book, article, journal, website, newsletter, or whatever. English may not be enthusiastically embraced, but it is seen as something necessary—a tool—and many clients need to have someone they can trust to take their side in handling the problems it involves.

As the English wordsmithing world in Japan is fairly small, editors are often relied on for things that may be outside of the normal scope of the profession, like setting up the shape of diagrams or tables, drafting copyright pages, consulting about layout or typefaces, and proofreading. These extra tasks can make projects interesting or frustrating, depending on one’s perspective. Concerning layout, Riggs believes that today there is somewhat more understanding of the need for a professional designer (who understands Japanese and Western typography rules) than there was 20 years ago, but clients still want to cut corners and place the burden on the editor (even the translator) or the printing company. Still, such plus-alpha assistance and after-service can be key to bringing customers back, says Riggs; if you are around when needed to help clients answer questions and resolve dilemmas, they’ll keep coming back.

Book Editing

Tapley’s role as book editor at Kodansha International involves much more than hands-on editing of texts. It begins with the idea or concept for a book. This may start with a proposal by an author, an idea devised by the editor, or a translation of an existing book. The editor has to decide what the book will look like: size, format, and so on. Once the general outline of a book has come together, Tapley talks to the sales and production people, gets a budget worked out and takes the book proposal to a company meeting where it will be approved or, just as likely, not. Only if it is approved can work then start on the book. By then, Tapley has a clear vision of the book she’s working on, what it will look like and what the intended audience is. With illustrated books, such as weighty tome on historical rings that Tapley brought in as an example, the editing process is fairly complicated. For the book on rings, Tapley worked with a senior editor, setting up the shoots for almost 2,000 rings from a Japanese collection as well as finding, getting permission for, and paying to use supplementary photos. She also worked with a designer, doing layout out for all pages in addition to basic text editing (made problematic by such details as academic inconsistencies in date calculation related to ancient Egypt).

Another type of Kodansha International book is translation. The example Tapley brought was Draw Your Own Manga (2003). For the English edition they omitted a few pages of the instructions in the original, commissioned some new pages, and added interviews with manga artists. She had to adapt the translated text to fit into the available space and decide what fonts to use where for visual impact. “I was determined to produce a book that made sense. The best-selling How to Draw Manga is a fun series, but contains some terrible translation errors. My favorite is a section headed ‘Deformed Bodies,’ which actually refers to the distortion or exaggeration of body parts for dramatic effect, such as drawing a huge fist to indicate a punch.”

Tapley notes that, when she gets down to working on a text, she finds that authors have rarely given her a finished product. As she often goes back to the author several times, bouncing various ideas around in the process, a text is liable to change quite a bit. Towards the end of the process come the cover design and jacket blurb, all of which are also her responsibility. Finally, she has to give information to the sales and marketing department, usually examples of similar books they can use as a yardstick, as they crank up for promotion of the arduously created book.

Editing Processes

Running a small, academically oriented translating company has given Riggs experience in the coordinating issues of periodicals and multi-author works using several translators, editors, and proofreaders. Translations are done either in-house or by freelance collaborators, checked for accuracy by a Japanese professional, and then edited for the publication in question. Essays published for a Japanese readership often need considerable adaptation for re-publication in English for a wider, international readership. Introductory and concluding material must often be created, the quantity of headings decreased, footnotes supplied or removed, repetition trimmed, and so forth. In making changes of this kind, the editor needs the firm trust of the client and author and good channels of communication. In recent years, the translation, editing, checking, and proofreading processes may all be done in digital files, without the traces of changes preserved at all stages. In order to be answerable for changes, Riggs believes it is important to keep every file at each stage of the process. Her preferred system includes footers in each draft giving the date and initials of the person who worked on the file.

Following the still widely favored traditional method, Tapley always does her first edit by hand on large-sized paper with plenty of space in the margins, so that the author or designer can have a good look on the page at any revisions that have been made and the notes made by the editor explaining the reasons for the changes. After the first edit on paper, she sometimes does second and third edits on screen, but she says she found that the way she would assimilate and understand a text was different on paper than on screen, so she has not abandoned her practice of doing the initial edit on paper. After editing on screen, she puts the date of completion of the edit in the name of the file sent back to the author or translator for revision.

When working as part of a team, as he experienced at Simul, Ouellet similarly recommends a system for naming files so that everyone concerned knows which editor, translator, or checker created a particular file, and in what order.

Riggs offered specific points of advice for editing translated essays. The first is to have basic Japanese ability or be able to negotiate closely with the writer. Knowing Japanese allows the editor to better intuit what the author is trying to say when the phrasing is awkward or convoluted. When working on a draft translation, editors sometimes become upset that “it doesn’t make sense,” which can happen because the English translation has not correctly reflected the transitions and subtleties in the original. Even translators with long track records may translate the words and sentences but not the logic. In such cases, the most efficient solution is for the editor to fix it, referring to the source text. Sometimes good material for a topic sentence is found at the end of a paragraph. Riggs believes there’s nothing invasive about moving sentences around or changing syntax as long as the author’s meaning and tone are conveyed accurately. Much can be done to improve readability by giving the draft better verbs and rephrasing excessively word-for-word renderings of the Japanese. While the original may be a “forest of headings,” the English translation can be more streamlined and consolidated, taking advantage of the nature of topic sentences to replace some headings. The editor’s tasks may also include adding identifiers for people and places that will be familiar to Japanese but not to a wider audience.

The panelists called attention to several reference works useful for checking questions that come up in editing and for showing clients a recognized authority on matters under contention. The Chicago Manual of Style (16th edition, 2011) and the SWET Style Sheet (1998) are standards used in Japan. Other authorities one can turn to include The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage (1999), the MLA Style Manual (1998) and MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers (2003), Words into Type (1974), and The Careful Writer by Theodore L. Bernstein (1995). Amy Einsohn’s The Copyeditor’s Handbook (2000) includes much valuable guidance and advice. For continuity, each article, book, or periodical should be edited using one dictionary and style authority. Since hyphenation may be slightly different from one dictionary to another, it is a good idea to agree with a client (and their printer) on which dictionary to use for the project, especially for a periodical.

The discussion moved on to style sheets. Tapley said she defines a style sheet as “basically notes to yourself and to the editor, translator or whomever you are working with to maintain consistency throughout the whole text and not have to keep looking things up.” A style sheet for her typically includes notes on anything she has to look up in Chicago Manual of Style (such as whether to spell out numbers or dates, etc.), technical vocabulary or terms, problematic spellings, names (if working on a novel, she includes personal information about the character, such as age, occupation, important events in their lives, etc., to ensure consistency), and so on. Ouellet noted that he often works with a style sheet document on the computer, employing pre-set templates with various fonts, paragraph formats, and so on. The panelists showed a number of publication-specific or in-house style sheets, such as the 26-page printed style sheet adopted by Monumenta Nipponica in 1998, which can be found at its website, and the handy-sized Japan Foundation in-house style guide, circulating in photocopied form among interested persons. Anyone working in-house was encouraged to create a style sheet, both to save time and ensure continuity should the job be passed on to others. Riggs added that her goal is “a style and terminology guide per client."

One participant raised the point that the distinction between editor and translator seems a little blurred in Japan. Inevitably so, said Riggs, because J-E translation involves a lot of editing processes. This has been partly expedient, however, because while a translator’s job is relatively clear, what an editor does is not so well understood. Although large publishers, foundations, and corporations may have in-house editors whose responsibilities are solely in editing, the piece to be edited often involves or comes from translation. While some editors don’t want to work on projects requiring Japanese language ability, there is great demand for editors whose command of Japanese is adequate for spot-checking or even higher level tasks. Riggs embraces the combination of editing with translation, but Ouellet is of the contrasting opinion that translation and editing are distinctly separate activities, and that although some people do both, top-level translators very rarely are high-level editors, and vice versa.

Levels of Editing

The skills and the level of editing required can vary greatly, depending on the type of material and subject matter. Ouellet said that while in theory every document that passes through an editor’s hands should come out in perfect, polished English, with every fact double-checked, so that the quality of the writing is high in every respect, in reality often that isn’t possible. The deadline might be short, the client (or author) might not want extensive changes made, or the client might be unprepared to pay the price for polished work. An editor needs to determine, in consultation with the client, exactly what level of editing the client wants. The person in charge might simply say, “Please check this,” and give little or no other editorial direction. Sometimes a client will ask for “proofreading” (kōsei), when what is really wanted is editing or even heavy rewriting. Or a client might ask for “rewriting” when only minimal revisions of the document will be acceptable. Particularly when working with a translation agency, it might be necessary to edit lightly and find ways to solve as many problems as possible to avoid presenting many questions or comments to the client about problematic wording. Such editorial issues will not be welcomed, because the agency will have to devote personnel time to deal with them, reducing its profit on the project.

Riggs’s approach is to “just go ahead” the best she can with a given assignment, polishing the English as much as possible, regardless of the amount of revision involved. Even if the pay is low, it can be difficult to scale back what seems necessary to fit the price. Because of the “dai-sensei” tradition in Japan, in which henshū (editing, copyediting) often does not question the wording or organization of author’s writing, Japanese texts can sometimes be difficult to understand and poorly organized. In the translation to English and subsequent editorial processes, these problems can often be dealt with. Often the client editor or coordinator who stands between the translator/editor and the author will be reluctant to accept major changes in a text, while the author in person may be quite amenable to the adaptation needed.

What Makes a Good Editor?

Tapley believes that basically a good editor is a good writer. The ability to grasp the concept, tone, and style of various texts is crucial. A good editor becomes an expert on the subject he or she is editing, doing extensive research on the topic at hand. Even if all you are asked to do is edit a letter, you need to know the background of the correspondence and what, if any, letter it is responding to. The editor should ask for this kind of background material whenever possible. Boning up on the topic of a project, which once required collecting reference books or spending hours in libraries, is now far easier thanks to the Internet. An editor also needs to be organized: whether in dealing with deadlines, checking with authors, translators, or recording details for accuracy and consistency, it pays to be methodical and keep work in order.

Ouellet recommends referring as often as necessary to a dictionary, thesaurus, and other writing aids, to ensure that a product will be as perfect as possible, even in regard to minor grammatical points and the like. He also emphasizes the importance of making wording clear and unambiguous (unless the client wants ambiguous or vague content). Perhaps most important, he notes, is to always puts oneself in the position of the reader.

For both editors and translators, Ouellet says, personal qualities also can be important determinants of such matters as one’s suitability for editing work, whether one is best-suited for freelance or in-house work, and one’s ultimate success and sense of fulfillment in regard to one’s work. A tendency to be a perfectionist is a definite asset, though one must not be rigid in that regard and must be able to adjust to a client’s wishes, time limits, and so on. A person who has a big ego or a fragile one may find writing work frustrating, because coworkers and clients often change work one has painstakingly done as they deem appropriate. A big ego will tend to cause one to regard one’s work too highly, which can lead to arrogance and resistance to accepting revisions, which in turn can cause conflict with clients, translators, or others working with one on a project—or to the appearance of arrogance, which in itself can cause clients to send work elsewhere. It’s important to realize that there always are other professionals who can do work as well or better than oneself—and perhaps even for a lower price. A fragile ego likely will cause one to frequently feel disappointed, underappreciated, or even under attack, likely resulting in a feeling of low self-esteem that might make the work unsatisfying and too unpleasant overall to be worthwhile.

Riggs values creativity in editors, particularly the ability to retain the voice of the author and honor the toil of the translator while editing for readability and clarity. A poor editor is one who projects his or her voice into the text and is unwilling to reach out for what the author wants to say.

Ouellet commented that in Japan both editors and translators are more likely to be able to work in a variety of fields than would be the case in a native-English country, where such professionals typically must specialize or limit their work to a very few subjects. In Japan an editor might work on anything from signs for museum halls to scholarly research studies, websites, or speeches of the prime minister. One can work for big corporations needing in-house editors for correspondence, PR, reports, or patents, or for foundations issuing specialized publications and documents in a particular field, or even for individual authors who want an editor who knows their work and circumstances and can be called when needed.

Although the June 25 event had been billed as a “workshop,” and the panelists had polled the participants, asking about their particular interests and backgrounds, there was not sufficient time to give specific advice to individuals. Those attending ranged from beginner, mid-career, and veteran editors working in a variety of situations, as well as people aspiring to be editors, along with translators and personnel from translation companies. Some expressed a desire for further SWET events on editing.

Originally published in the SWET Newsletter No. 109 (September 2005), pp. 19–38

© 2005 Damon Shulenberger

Remembering March 11, 2011: Stories

   March 11 and Its Aftermath: A Study in (Mis)perceptions by Bob Gavey
   3.11 – 4.11 (9.11) by Anna Husson Isozaki
   Spring 2011 by William Wetherall
   Mud by David Gilman-Frederick
   Lost in Information by Asakura Kazuko

The powerful earthquake and its aftershocks, the tsunami that hit the northern coast of Honshu, and then the manmade nuclear power plant disaster on March 11 have jolted everyone out of routines and circumstances that we had come to take for granted. The impact has been different for each one of us, but few would say our lives and our attitudes have been quite the same since. To mark and remember that impact, the SWET Newsletter asked several members to write about what happened to them and how it resonates in their lives. These stories are a beginning. We hope this series can continue, giving our community a chance to share our experiences and reflect on our lives and the work we do.

SWET Events

Editing for Better Nonfiction Translation, by Lynne E. Riggs

The SWET workshop “Editing Translation for Better Communication,” led by translator/editor Lynne E. Riggs, was held in Kobe on February 19, 2011. Sixteen participants attended from Shiga prefecture, Shikoku, Awaji, Osaka, and other parts of the Kansai area. See also the related articles Translation and Editing and Editing in Japan.

David Moreton on Publishing the Diaries of an English P.O.W., by David Gilman-Frederick

David Moreton is an English teacher at Tokushima Bunri University. He holds an M.A. in Asian Studies from the University of British Columbia. On Sunday, March 27, 2011, he spoke about his most recent work, Surviving the War: The Secret Diaries of an English P.O.W. along the Thailand-Burma Railway, 1942–1945 (Tokushima, Japan: Education Publishing Center, 2010).

From the Trenches

Newsletter News: Toward a New Phase, by the SWET Newsletter Editorial Team

Even without a natural disaster of epic proportions, 2011 seemed slated to be a turning-point year for SWET. With our 30th anniversary behind us, generation change rapidly taking place within our membership, and the rise of new technologies, values, and tastes, it seems time for something fresh. The SWET Newsletter in its present form is ready to be superseded.

The current editorial team that has supported the newsletter in its present guise will carry on in this format for two more issues, No. 129 and No. 130, taking us to the beginning of 2012. We look forward to input and contributions to fill our pages for these issues so that we can go out with our sails filled right up to our self-proposed finish line. Please help make the next two issues rich and full through our “mutual exchange of professional wisdom.”

So there is plenty of time to think: What will come next? Who will be its architects and coordinators? What are the potentials and possibilities? We hope that all those who value the society and sharing of wordsmiths will think about how to answer such questions and contribute to implementation of the answers arrived at. Those of us who now work on the Newsletter hope there will be plenty of ideas, discussion, and mulling of options.

There is much to be learned from other organizations. Even though a cross-professional society like SWET seems to be one of a kind in the world, models of similar feather may be found in the Editors’ Association of Canada (another organization with a 30-year history), the American Copy Editors Society, the Editorial Freelancers Association in the United States, the Society of Editors (New South Wales, Australia), the Society for Editors and Proofreaders in the United Kingdom, the American Translators Association, and so on, all of which are a few mouse clicks away even for the most remotely located professional.

So, don’t sit back and wait to see what someone else will do! Remember, SWET is you!

SWET Newsletter Committee
newsletter [at] swet.jp

Book Review

Awa Naoko in Translation

Reviewed by Misa Dikengil Lindberg

A Fox’s Window and Other Stories, by Awa Naoko. Translated by Toshiya Kamei. New Orleans: UNO Press, 2009. ISBN 978-1-60801-006-6, $22.95.

Only a few blocks away from the apartment building in Aoyama where, in November 1980, 100 writers, editors, translators, and others of their kind had gathered and founded SWET, 33 SWETers—young, not-so-young, and 30 years older—gathered at the Wesley Center on November 3, 2010 to celebrate the beginning of SWET’s fourth decade. Remarks by James Baxter, Janine Beichman, Juliet Winters Carpenter, Andrew Horvat, Lynne Riggs, Mark Schreiber, and Fred Uleman noted the strengths of the organization and made suggestions for the future. Messages were also received from Anne Bergasse, Torkil Christensen, and Leza Lowitz.

The wave of publishing and writing in English about Japan that swelled from the end of World War II and crested in the mid-1990s gave many teachers and wordsmiths lucrative careers. Then the speculative Bubble burst, Kobe quaked, and Chinese capitalism surged. The print publishing industry and cultural exchange endeavors are in recession, but “internationalism” and “globalism” are irreversible trends for the island nation of Japan. With English apparently the lingua franca of Asia, the lighthouse that SWET has provided for professionals working with the English word in a non-Anglophone environment still seems a needed edifice. The advent of the Internet and digital technology have revolutionized the media and the reference tools we use, but have done little to replace the human interface. Computers and software programs still cannot fix garbled sentences or read between the lines; the human brain can. Indeed, the digital age has simply made the tasks we must perform even more overwhelming.

    There are societies and associations of all sorts in Japan—for writers, teachers, translators, women executives, English instructors, and so on—but SWET has been the only organization that reaches out to those whose work with the English word across professions. Linguists and literature professors are editors and proofreaders; translators are page-layout advisors and proofreaders; editors are translators in disguise; rewriters are translators—especially in Japan—adding currency to our affinity with each other as “wordsmiths.” Passing on the expertise and experience of the past to the next generation, SWET has long provided a place where people can discuss shared problems, improve their skills, and establish professional connections both offline and in cyberspace.
    There are now plenty of ways to obtain information. Thanks to the Internet and the digital revolution in databases and publishing, one can ask questions, get reliable answers, and engage in discussion without ever changing out of pajamas. So why do we need an organization like SWET? What do we want from it that we can’t get otherwise, elsewhere? What can we do to advance the goals that brought us to this society? Every decade or so, we ask ourselves these questions anew.
    The SWET Newsletter invites you to ponder such questions in order to articulate, with those who attended the 30th anniversary celebration in Tokyo November 3, 2010, what we can and should be on the threshold of our fourth decade. This juncture seems to be a little different from the beginning of other phases in our history; it coincides with a shift in generations, making the society perhaps more open than ever to new ideas and initiatives and new modes of doing things. All SWET members, no matter where they are, are eligible and welcome to shape the group’s activities and launch its projects. We encourage you to make your voice heard. Here we present highlights of the remarks presented at the 30th anniversary celebration and the messages received on that occasion as samples of the different ways people see SWET and give it their support.

Please share your thoughts with us, HERE.

*   *   *

“I applaud you!”
James Baxter, historian and currently director of the Inter-University Center for Japanese Language Studies, Yokohama, was previously professor at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies (Nichibunken) in Kyoto. At Nichibunken, he was in charge of editing the periodical Japan Review and other English-language publications for the Center. He continues to edit papers, academic and otherwise, for scholars on both a pro bono and a professional basis. As a scholar and administrator on the front lines of Japan’s efforts in international exchange, Baxter has nevertheless long been a member of SWET, and speaking of the challenges and frustrations faced by wordsmiths here, Baxter said, “I know how hard it is.” He added, “Precisely because of the terrible English—even in such simple things as the abstracts of articles—Japanese scholarship does not get its due overseas.”
    Reflecting how it is now the norm for researchers to scan online resources for information and pick and choose what is most accessible, he regrets that “while in many fields there is much research that is worthy in Japanese, if international scholars read an abstract that is badly written, they are not going to bother to pursue the research in its original.” Baxter is a member of the advisory board for Sokendai Review of Cultural and Social Studies, which is the relatively new refereed journal of the Graduate University for Advanced Studies, a consortium institution of which Nichibunken is a member. The journal’s content is mostly in Japanese, and he mourned that while “the main parts in English are the abstracts, for the last two years the abstracts have really, really not done justice to the Japanese originals.” These experiences underline the importance of what SWET wordsmiths do, he emphasized, concluding, “I applaud you!”

“The mutual exchange of professional wisdom”
Anne Bergasse, who heads the Abinitio Design studio with her husband Kiwaki Tetsuji, is designer of the SWET Newsletter. In a message to those gathered in Aoyama on November 3, Bergasse wrote of her appreciation of SWET:
. . . over the 20-plus years that I’ve been [in Japan], I’ve had my share of working with amateur writers and editors. In contrast and without exception, the writers or “word” people from the SWET membership that I have had the pleasure of working with have always been professional, with exacting standards. From them, I learned a lot and it was a mutual exchange of professional wisdom.
    I think this is the strength of SWET: “The mutual exchange of professional wisdom.”
    Bergasse’s message also expressed her hope that more design professionals would be involved with SWET. “How do we entice more designers to join SWET?” Designers may express more eloquence in their graphics and layouts than in the words that their work holds, but they have long taught us that, as Bergasse reiterates, “like two sides of a coin, the two sides of a moving and interesting piece of writing are “content” and “presentation.” When an experienced designer and writer work together there is truly a “mutual exchange of professional wisdom.” This is a message that will ring in our ears in the years ahead.

 “Yes! Mutuality, rather than hierarchy.”
Janine Beichman, professor of Japanese literature at Daito Bunka University, is a contributor to the SWET Newsletter as well as one of its most stalwart fans. She celebrates the space it gives articles that might not be published elswhere, and applauds the near-anonymous volunteer efforts that go into its publication, projecting the energy of the organization as a whole, rather than self-interested individual agendas. Beichman, who is a member of various other societies and associations and is familiar with the foibles of academic institutions, expressed praise for SWET’s lack of hierarchy and the generally harmonious collaboration that characterizes its management. “It is almost as if some of the good qualities of the collectives in the 1960s United States are alive in SWET,” she observes. “That’s something to treasure as you consider where SWET should go from here.”

SWET’s goals are to facilitate the flow of information among members, encourage the sharing of know-how and experience, and provide a vehicle for increased contact among people working in related fields. We hope our efforts will result in better working conditions and higher standards of expertise in the many fields that relate to the use of written English in Japan, be they translation, rewriting, publishing, editing, copywriting, book and magazine design, or allied fields.

“We want SWET, like Mt. Fuji, always to be there.”
Despite her busy schedule of teaching and translating (often two or three books simultaneously), Juliet Winters Carpenter, translator and professor at Doshisha Women’s College, Kyoto, supplies the SWET Newsletter Committee with ideas for reviews, articles, and suggestions for events, as well as speaking at and attending as many events and meetings as she can. Carpenter explained that she has not always been an active SWET member, but that it has become an important institution to her in recent years. Especially the people she meets at its gatherings, she remarked, are “people who are always worth coming all the way from Kyoto to see.” Recalling her trip up to Tokyo on the Shinkansen, she honored SWET with a surprising simile: “SWET is kind of like Mt. Fuji—you might not get to all the meetings, there might have been something you really planned on going to, but didn’t—but like Mt. Fuji, SWET would still be there; and I’d like to think that SWET will always be there.”
    Carpenter described her appreciation for the umbrella SWET creates, under which people of different specialties—who are often described as wordsmiths—gather together, and learn from each other. When she needed to proofread a book she was involved in, she attended SWET’s Proofreading Workshop and picked up numerous tips for the times when she has to put on that different “hat” from the ones she usually wears. “SWET is a wonderful institution because it provides a place where you can get help—or vent your frustrations—as a translator, and you can enjoy a forum where wordsmiths come together—people who all share this passion about words. I don’t know how much wisdom I have to share, but I have a lot of passion, and I value the chance to absorb from other people who really care deeply about these same things.”

“Let us keep sharing and polishing the wonder of English”
Now an emeritus professor residing in Sapporo, Torkil Christensen is an indispensable member of the SWET Newsletter team who with distinctive wit and humor digests the threads on the organization’s Internet mailing list (SWET-L) for readers of the Newsletter. Sending “greetings and felicitations on the auspicious occasion of SWET’s 30th,” Christensen reminded us that though “thirty years used to be a lifetime, it is not even half of what we get today,” so this is hopefully just the start for SWET. Applauding the landmark achievements in publishing the Japan Style Sheet and maintaining SWET-L, he urges us to “keep sharing and polishing the wonders of English,” and to invigorate “the wrinkles of our gray matter through the mutual help and assistance that SWET offers.”

“The passionate commitment of translators, and the value of social capital”
Andrew Horvat currently serves as director of the Stanford Center for Technology and Innovation in Kyoto and is a part-time instructor at Showa Women’s University. Horvat referred to his earlier efforts for the proposed TES-Net (Translation and Editing Support Network) project aimed at encouraging Japanese scholars to publish more work in English (see SWET Newsletter 108), to which he contributed while he was Tokyo representative of the Asia Foundation. The Asia Foundation has funded educational and cultural exchange programs between Japan and the United States since the early post–World War II period—the days “when Japan and the United States were thrown together as allies and suddenly needed to really know each other.” About 50 million dollars were spent on promoting such cultural exchange, he told us, noting that even the often-maligned CIA put its money behind praiseworthy translation and publishing projects. Such endeavors—bread and butter for SWET members—are key elements of cultural exchange, but require “passionate commitment” and often arduous, solitary work. Horvat included an anecdote from Hungary, the land of his birth, describing how A. A. Milne’s classic Winnie the Pooh, translated into Hungarian by the country’s foremost humorist, went on to inspire even a Hungarian rock-and-roll star. Still, noting that “sometimes passion is not enough,” and observing that “what translators are doing is not commercially viable,” Horvat offers the view that sometimes government funding is necessary. “If you are looking for SWET to be around in the next thirty years, the most important thing is to find a way to make what you are doing of interest to a foundation, a government, or some kind of organization that believes that the promotion of cultural and educational exchange is in its interest.” The existence of an organization like SWET, he reminded us, is social capital: “The concept of social capital is that an organization that has been founded to achieve a particular goal is not only advantageous to that organization and its members, but to society as a whole. So were SWET to disappear tomorrow, it would not just be your loss, it would be a loss for the whole concept of transpacific exchange.”

“A true society . . . of like-minded souls”
Prolific writer, editor, co-translator, and poet as well as yoga teacher, Leza Lowitz thanks SWET for helping her launch her successful career when she first came to Tokyo two decades ago. Not long after finding her first job as editor at the University of Tokyo Press, leading SWET organizer Susie Schmidt urged her to join the society. “I was not much of a joiner,” wrote Lowitz, who could not attend the 30th anniversary celebration but sent us her message beforehand, “but I nonetheless paid heed to the suggestion and signed up. What a relief to soon find that SWET was the kind of group that other “non-joiners” joined! I felt immediately at home. Through the all-volunteer and marvelously grass-roots gatherings and publications, I learned how to write, edit, publish and market a book. I learned about fonts and fiction, commas and colophons. I made lifelong friends, found jobs, and met my publisher—Peter Goodman of Stone Bridge Press, also a long-time SWETer. SWET helped me realize my dream of becoming a writer and offered a wonderful model of teamwork and vision.”
    Calling our attention to the Wikipedia definition of “society,” Lowitz reminds us what SWET brings to Japan’s literary world: a society that “allows its members to achieve needs or wishes they could not fulfill alone. . . certain resources, objectives, requirements, or results . . .[that] can only be gotten in a collective, collaborative manner, [and] teamwork [that] becomes the valid functional means to individual ends.” The society that is SWET, declares Lowitz, is “a gathering of like-minded souls, and as the thirty-year anniversary proves, it is a sustainable one that is as strong as ever.”

SWET’s membership is defined less by occupation than by the desire to share experience, information, and expertise regarding English writing and publishing.

“Renewed commitment to improving the professional abilities of wordsmiths”
Lynne E. Riggs, translator and editor of mainly non-fiction work in the humanities and social sciences, is currently coordinator of the SWET Newsletter editorial team. She writes of her hope to see translation and editing in Japan recognized for the professions they are—not dismissed as amateur or clerical activities that anyone can perform. “The caliber of Japan’s international participation could be dramatically enhanced by wider recognition of the need for real translation and editorial expertise.” SWET has been able to increase the visibility of professional wordsmiths somewhat, but there is much more to be done. Riggs suggests the following approaches:
    More emphasis on lectures, workshops, educational programs, and networking among members. A renewed commitment to the improvement of wordsmiths’ professional abilities and to cross-professional collaboration, networking, and skill-sharing among members can give individuals confidence and strengthen their voices, contributing to recognition of what we do.
    An advocacy program to lend weight to the position that translation, editing, and writing are occupations requiring specialized expertise. SWET should develop a list of recommendations and guidelines, perhaps similar to the wonderful resources provided by the U.K. Institute of Translation and Interpreting.
 
“Necessity is the mother of invention . . .”
Columnist and translator Mark Schreiber, a charter member of SWET, gently ridiculed the apparent never-ending fascination with what may well be “invented Japan” (his most recent encounter having been with a foreign TV crew searching for a shop where sushi is served atop a naked woman’s stomach). Rather than exploit clichés and stereotypes that never seem to go away, he declared that he finds no shortage of fresh topics to write about: “I still feel stimulated and interested to make Japan appreciated—or disliked—it doesn’t matter, because I’m not a propagandist.” Schreiber is known for unconventional topics ranging from the story behind the invention of the Gokiburi Hoi-hoi “roach motel” to tabloidesque accounts of ancient and modern crimes.
    A growing challenge writers face today, lamented Schreiber, comes from Internet blogs. Articles about Japan—“many of them quite good,” he ruefully admitted—are everywhere, and are available for free, much to the consternation of those who “shed so much blood, sweat, and tears to meet deadlines, keep editors happy, write well, etc.” via more traditional publishing channels. Schreiber concludes that writers may have to depend more on “the proposal type of business” to get publications to “understand that these are stories which need to be told, which have to be told, and which will by their telling create a larger body of information.” To meet the challenges of the digital age, he advised fellow SWETers that “necessity is the mother of invention—and I think that goes for writers, editors, and translators as well.”

“SWET will be what you make it. You are SWET. Happy Birthday.”
Playing a leading role in SWET from the beginning, in 1974 translator Fred Uleman had founded his own translation company—Japan Research, Inc.—and had established a broad professional network, especially among translators. He has also been a driving force in the Japan Association of Translators, which branched off from SWET in 1985. “SWET is some very good people,” he said, who are “good not only at what they do, but at getting things done and making things happen right.” Two of the dynamic stand-outs were Susie Schmidt and Becky Davis—competent, can-do, no-nonsense people who were personable, efficient, and got results.” Then and now, SWET is people taking the initiative, doing things—like setting up lectures, panels, compiling the Japan Style Sheet, editing and publishing Wordcraft, managing the SWET-L mailing list, doing maintenance on the website, updating the membership database, writing, editing, proofreading, designing the SWET Newsletter, answering questions that come into SWET and mailing out materials to new members, keeping its accounts, creating its directory of members, coming up with ideas for events, contacting potential speakers, working reception at events, and so on. People take turns when necessary, and pitch in when needed.
    “Over the years, we have sometimes wondered if SWET should have a formal hierarchy—with officers and everything,” Uleman recalled, with Beichman’s comments in mind, “but we have decided it did not need them.” Making decisions by consensus and through the leadership of initiative, the organization trundled along without adopting a hierarchy. The organization does have a nominal set of directors, “but they are not directors in the sense of actually directing anything. They are more like an archive of decisions the self-appointed members of the Steering Committee have already made. So that is what SWET has been: a very loose, non-structured organization of can-do people who do things.”
    As for what SWET should be from now on, said Uleman, “that’s what each member has to ask him- or herself. What do you want to do? We hope you will speak up—because that is part of SWET’s vision for the future. SWET will be what you make it. You are SWET. Happy birthday!”

For a detailed account of SWET’s three decades, see this article on the SWET website.

(Illustration by John Shelley 2011)

Lem Fugitt is a Tokyo-based geek-about-town, using his experience in technology and business to write regularly on items of technical interest. He writes here about his recent conversion to a new way of putting thoughts into written words.

If anyone had asked me back in March 2010 if there was anything I really wanted or needed to improve my writing, my immediate answer would have been, “No, everything is just fine.” I wasn’t looking for a solution to my “workflow/productivity problem” because I didn’t think I had a problem.
     The best metaphor to describe my situation was that sometimes you get a small splinter in your finger. You hardly even notice it. It irritates at a very low level and maybe you develop a low-grade infection, but you learn to live with it and ignore it and after a while you forget it’s even there. That’s what was happening with my writing using a laptop computer.
     In April 2010 I was in the US on business, and almost on a whim decided to purchase an iPad, which had just hit the market and was generating tremendous buzz. I wanted to see what it could do, but I didn’t have high expectations. I honestly thought its main use would be for me to watch movies and play games on planes, killing time during my 12-hour international flights.
     However, it wasn’t long before I realized that the iPad was rapidly starting to be used for the vast majority of functions where I had previously used my laptop. Over the course of the next two weeks I began to depend on the iPad more and more, and found that I only used my laptop to access older files stored on its hard disk.
     At first, I only turned on my new gadget to take a few quick notes, but the writing process on the iPad was so simple and easy that I found myself writing longer and longer pieces. I started carrying it around with me everywhere, even when I went for a short walk in the park.
     One Friday evening during my trip I attended a hackerspace meeting in Brooklyn. On the 30-minute trip back to Manhattan, I transferred several digital photos from my camera, edited them, wrote a blog post, and published it to the Internet, all while traveling on the subway. This made me realize how powerful the iPad could be for my purposes. I would never have thought of using my laptop in the same way. All the limitations of slow startup time, large ponderous applications, and worktime constrained by battery life, had vanished. The splinter and infection that had been slowing me down were suddenly gone. My relief was as palpable as it was unexpected.

Symbiotic Writing Patterns

My writing falls into three main categories: blog posts, magazine articles, and formal reports and presentations, with each category driven by different dynamics. Blogging tends to be time-sensitive; magazine articles have much longer timeframes and require much more preparation, fact-checking, and precision. The formal reports, typically market or product analyses performed for clients, are the most demanding and need the most thought, quality and accuracy, but often have short deadlines.
     These three categories are closely linked in my life, feeding each other to generate income. A single blog post, or series of posts, often results in a request for a more extended print magazine article. My print articles and blog posts generate visibility and credibility, and help to establish and extend my reputation as an expert in my field, attracting more clients for my consulting practice. My clients provide me with early access to new products and breaking news, and these items become great fodder for my blog posts.
     Robots Dreams, my robotics and technology blog, is the vehicle for most of my blog posts, though I do publish several other specialty blogs, all of which generate revenue using a combination of Google AdSense advertising and Amazon. The content is almost always time-critical, and I rush to get breaking news up on the Internet before my rivals in the field. It’s very much a dog-eat-dog business. The first reporter to publish hot technology news will get picked up by the top websites in the field, such as Engadget, Gizmodo, and Boing Boing. When they feature a story, the resulting traffic numbers to the original source blog can be incredible, usually creating regular blog readers. The second blogger to post the same news just gets a big yawn.
     Robots Dreams itself draws an average of roughly 100,000 visitors per month. Sustaining that level of traffic can be a challenge, and it is critical to consistently produce interesting, fresh, timely content, and here there are real advantages to using the iPad.
     The biggest immediate advantage I discovered is that I can create content in real time. At an event like a competition, interview, or trade show, I am able to write and file my story while the facts are still fresh in my mind, without worrying about the battery running out, or being slowed down by the application or operating system. The timeliness and accuracy of my stories has improved noticeably, and the number of stories I could create in the same period of time has increased considerably.
     A pleasant side-effect has been that when I return home in the evening, my work is already completed, instead of waiting for me to tackle it. Other benefits have made themselves apparent. My posture has improved, because I no longer need to carry a heavy shoulder bag, loaded down with a large laptop and several spare battery packs.
     I’m not claiming that the iPad is perfect. Far from it—it has definite limitations. I wouldn’t try to write a whole book using it, or process hundreds of photos, or edit professional videos. It just doesn’t have the horsepower to support that kind of processing. In an odd way, that’s also turned out to be an advantage as it’s caused me to rethink my workflow. At home I use an optimized Windows desktop system to handle those specialized tasks since they represent just a small percentage of my total computing needs. In contrast, the iPad handles 100 percent of my portable computing and writing needs.
     The typical first-generation-type limitations also apply; for example, exchanging documents and files between systems or applications is not easy, but so far that hasn’t been a major problem. I expect the situation to improve as we see new releases of the operating system and applications, but I really want to see Apple and the application developers improve file and document connectivity, as well as compatibility with other software. Although the system is currently usable, more options for importing and exporting document file types to and from the iPad would be most welcome. The free Dropbox service is supported by many applications, though, and this allows relatively seamless transfer between the iPad and my desktop.
     I also like the fact that most applications are very low-cost compared to their desktop equivalents – the cost of a beer or two at most, and are easily installed and updated. It’s possible to buy an application for a single function in a single project and then never use it again, which is something you think twice about doing with desktop software.

Applying the iPad

     For applications to support my writing, I’m currently using iThoughtsHD for mind mapping, Apple’s Pages to write articles, and their Keynote for presentations, Photogene for quick editing of photos, and BlogPress for publishing blog posts. To gather and organize content from the Internet quickly I use a few other applications, like Evernote, Flipboard, and Diigo. The iRecorder app is particularly useful since it allows me to record interviews unobtrusively.
     For hardware add-ons, in addition to the basic iPad, I use the standard Apple Bluetooth keyboard, the VGA cable for presentations, and the Camera Connection Kit to transfer photos from my camera’s SD card and to plug in a USB microphone. I also use the standard black Apple iPad case, allowing me to use the iPad at a low angle, thereby eliminating the typical laptop screen “wall” between myself and the interviewee.
     If my only use for it were writing, I would like to see a matte screen to eliminate some of the glare and visibility problems when working outdoors (I prefer a glossy screen for photos and images).
     All things considered, I’m extremely happy with the iPad, even though it’s not perfect, it’s a first-generation product with first-generation applications, and it has limitations. That being said, it’s made dramatic positive changes to my workflow, my output, and my income.

Lem Fugitt is a Tokyo-based geek-about-town, using his experience in technology and business to write regularly on items of technical interest. He writes here about his recent conversion to a new way of putting thoughts into written words.

(Illustration by John Shelley 2011; photograph by Hugh Ashton)

The delay in printing and delivery of SWET Newsletter, No. 127 was part of the testimony of the Great East Japan Earthquake and Tsunami. We thank members for waiting patiently for it to appear.
The Komiyama Printing Company factory that does the actual printing of the SWET Newsletter is located in Motoyoshi-machi, Miyagi Prefecture, in the mountains along the line between Sendai and Kessenuma, the area devastated by the tsunami. On March 11, just as the PDF for printing No. 127 was sent to the factory, the powerful main quake occurred. Electricity was cut off and the employees of the factory scattered to check the safety of their families and homes. The safety of all the employees and their families was later confirmed and the factory suffered no damage, but 36 of the 200 employees lost their homes and are living in shelters. Transport to and from the area was severely restricted for three weeks, but as of April 4, all services were restored.

We would like to express our sincere thanks for the good work of the employees of the Komiyama factory and our hope that their difficulties will soon be overcome.

Translating from Japanese to English

Translation as a Teaching and Learning Tool, by Ann Cary

English Writing in Japan

Japan Writers Conference 2010: Highlights, by John Gribble

SWET Events

How the Heck Do You Write About Japan? by Alice Gordenker

Journalist Alice Gordenker spoke to SWET on September 16, 2010 in Tokyo, providing a behind-the-scenes account of how she crafts her popular “So, What the Heck Is That?” column for the Japan Times. In this monthly column, now in its fifth year, Gordenker has achieved a balance of humor and respect in meticulously researched yet decidedly offbeat reports on everything from traditional talismans to industrial safety. This article is based on her lecture, in which she covered topics ranging from the genesis of the column to translation challenges and how she met them.

Thinking Forward: SWET Starts Its Fourth Decade, by Lynne E. Riggs

Only a few blocks away from the apartment building in Aoyama where, in November 1980, 100 writers, editors, translators, and others of their kind had gathered and founded SWET, 33 SWETers—young, not-so-young, and 30 years older—gathered at Wesley Center to celebrate the beginning of SWET’s fourth decade. Remarks by James Baxter, Janine Beichman, Juliet Winters Carpenter, Andrew Horvat, Lynne Riggs, Mark Schreiber, and Fred Uleman noted the strengths of the organization and made suggestions for the future. Messages were also received from Anne Bergasse, Torkil Christensen, and Leza Lowitz.

SWET Cyber Matters

Stonewalling Clients and Timely Usage, by Torkil Christensen
Rounding out 2010, SWET-L, our ever-reliable source of helpful and timely advice, keeps listers abreast of new crinkles in English.

From the Trenches

A Writer’s Look at the iPad, by Lem Fugitt

Lem Fugitt is a Tokyo-based geek-about-town, using his experience in technology and business to write regularly on items of technical interest. He writes here about his recent conversion to a new way of putting thoughts into written words.

Book Reviews

A Pair of Fun, Passionate, Self-Published Thrillers
Reviewed by Bob Poulson

Beneath Grey Skies, by Hugh Ashton. J-views, 2010. Hardcover. ISBN 978-4-990-5165-2-9, $29.99.

Reviewed by Jens Wilkinson
At the Sharpe End, by Hugh Ashton. J-views, 2010. Paperback. ISBN 978-4990516536, $18.50.

Translating from Japanese to English

Summer School Workshop: Translating Tawada Yōko, by Ginny Tapley Takemori

Ginny Tapley Takemori attended the 2010 annual Summer School hosted by the British Centre for Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, U.K. Here she describes the intense experience of this unique opportunity for literary translators to come together with each other and with other publishing professionals. Could this type of initiative be more widely applied in translation studies?

SWET Events

Rebecca Otowa on Writing At Home in Japan, by Avery Udagawa

Rebecca Otowa, author of At Home in Japan: A Foreign Woman’s Journey of Discovery (Tuttle, 2010; reviewed in SWET Newsletter No. 124: “A Semantic Adventure,” pp. 64–67), spoke to SWETers on June 17, 2010, at Wesley Center in Minami Aoyama, Tokyo, about the six-year process of writing, illustrating, and revising her collection of essays.

Alternative Luxuries in Rural Japan: An Interview with Andy Couturier, by Suzanne Kamata

In the summer of 2010, American writer, poet, and teacher Andy Couturier visited Japan and spoke to SWET members about his second book, A Different Kind of Luxury: Japanese Lessons in Simple Living and Inner Abundance (Stone Bridge Press). The book, which began as a series of essays in the Japan Times, profiles 11 Japanese men and women who have learned to live lightly upon the earth with as little money as possible and an abundance of time—time that allows them to grow their own organic food, revel in the beauty of nature, pursue creative endeavors, and contemplate the deeper aspects of life. Suzanne Kamata corresponded with Couturier to learn more about his work, his worldview, and the people he writes about.

SWET Cyber Matters

In the Jerry-built Edifice of English and Editing as Mentoring, by Torkil Christensen

SWET-L digs into ways to improve professionally, creatively explaining the ineffable in order to appease clients and maintain spirits. This installment of the discussion on SWET-L (May to August 2010), along with its usual bits and pieces of language-work, includes a thread about improving writing skills to elevate the polish of translations that brought out the thoughtful side of the denizens of the list at its best.

Book Review

Literary Translation: Interpretation and Permutation

Reviewed by Edward Lipsett
One Poem in Search of a Translator: Rewriting ‘Les Fenêtres’ by Apollinaire. Edited by Eugenia Loffredo and Manuela Perteghella. Oxford; Bern: Peter Lang, 2008. ISBN 978-3-03911-408-5, £34.00.

Translating from Japanese to English

Translating and Blogging in Sapporo, by Deborah Davidson and Kathleen Morikawa

From Sapporo, Kathleen Morikawa interviews Hokkaido translator Deborah Davidson, talking about Davidson’s versatile translating career (which has involved topics as wide-ranging as etegami art, Ainu folktales, and wagashi sweets) and her life’s work—making the novels of best-selling Hokkaido-based author Ayako Miura (1922–1999) more accessible to an international audience (see her website).

The Hadashi no Gen Project, by Alan Gleason

Alan Gleason’s experience as a translator began in 1980 with the manga Hadashi no Gen (Barefoot Gen), as part of a volunteer project that continues today. Project Gen inadvertently became the world’s first publisher of manga in translation when it issued Barefoot Gen Volume One in 1978. With the tenth and final English volume completed in 2009, the Gen series bears witness to the evolution of the translation of manga over three decades. Gleason described that evolution at a session of the 21st International Japanese English Translation Conference (IJET-21) in May 2010, and agreed to write about it in detail for SWET members as well. Gleason lives in Tokyo, where he edits and translates websites, books, articles, and academic papers on language, the arts, and environmental science. Gleason’s “How We Got Here” story was published in SWET Newsletter 109 (2002) under the title “The Serendipitous Translator.”

SWET Events

Setting Up a Translation Company in Japan, by Phil Robertson

Professional translator and technical writer Phil Robertson is co-founder of Honyaku Plus, based in Jimbocho. On February 16, 2010, he took valuable time out of his tight work schedule to share the story of the early career that led him to Japan, along with some of the lessons he has learned in the course of establishing a professional translation business in the fields of international relations, information technology, emerging technologies, medicine, economics, digital camera technology, and sports.

SWET Japan Style Sheet in 2010, by Lynne E. Riggs

The Japan Style Sheet (Stone Bridge Press, 1998) still stands as the most reliable tool for making style decisions about the use of Japanese words in English text. Fourteen experienced SWET editors discussed ways of updating it and making it more widely available.

SWET Cyber Matters

More Adventures in the Quest for “Real English,” by Torkil Christensen

Another chapter in the life of SWET-L, never tiring at explaining to the puzzled (except when it’s clients who are dishing it up). Much English as we wish it were not used is corrected, explicated, and improved with erudition and ample good cheer for beleaguered keyboard-bound anchorites.

From the Trenches

Photos and Words—Which Is the Illustration? by Alfie Goodrich

Alfie Goodrich is a British-born photographer and writer who has been living in Japan for three years, after 12 years of coming and going between the U.K. and Japan. His work has been published in a wide variety of magazines, including the Wall Street Journal and Time. As well as taking pictures, Goodrich teaches photographic skills through workshops and “photowalks.” Examples of his work and details of his teaching can be found at www.japanorama.co.uk. Here he talks about the relationship between his images and words.

Book Reviews

Finding Writing Hints in Fiction

Reviewed by Jens Wilkinson
Reading Like a Writer: A Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them. By Francine Prose. New York: Harper Perennial, 2006. Softcover, ISBN 978-0-06-077705-0.

Defending the Translation Endeavor

Reviewed by Charles De Wolf
Why Translation Matters. By Edith Grossman. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010. Hardcover. ISBN 978-0-300-12656-3, $24.00.

Roundtable

Translating Shiba Ryōtarō‘s Saka no Ue no Kumo, with Juliet Winters Carpenter, Andrew Cobbing, Paul McCarthy, Saitō Sumio, Takechi Manabu, and Noda Makito

In 2009, translation got underway of best-selling novelist Shiba Ryōtarō‘s eight-volume Saka no ue no kumo (working title, “Clouds Above the Hill”), a planned three-year project funded through Japan Documents, an independent publisher under the direction of Saitō Sumio. The translators are Juliet Winters Carpenter (professor, Doshisha Women’s College of Liberal Arts, Kyoto), Andrew Cobbing (professor, University of Nottingham, U.K.), and Paul McCarthy (professor, Surugadai University, Tokyo). Two Japanese translators experienced with J-E translation, Takechi Manabu and Noda Makito, are also helping with the project as translation checkers. SWET asked the translators, publisher Saitō, the two checkers, and Phyllis Birnbaum, editor of the translation, to discuss their perspectives on and experiences with the project so far. As of April 2010, translation of three volumes of Shiba’s novel have been completed.

SWET Events

Walking through History and Writing about Culture, by Enbutsu Sumiko

On a hot July day in 2009, SWET’s Summer Party featured a kaiseki lunch at the Kantokutei restaurant in Tokyo’s Koishikawa Kōrakuen garden and a talk by Sumiko Enbutsu. Enbutsu, author of Discover Shitamachi: A Walking Guide to the Other Tokyo (1984), Water Walks in the Suburbs of Tokyo (2000), A Flower Lover’s Guide to Tokyo (Kodansha International, 2007), and other walking guides to Tokyo and surrounding areas, spoke about how her books came about and some of the activities and research projects in which she has been involved. This article is a condensed and edited transcript of her talk.

SWET Member News

Saji Yasuo: I-House Press and English-Language Nonfiction Publishing in Japan, by Imoto Chikako

Saji Yasuo, publications officer of I-House Press, has been a member of SWET since its early days and is the proud owner of a full set of the SWET Newsletter. His career parallels that of many veteran SWET members, and he has been witness to the great changes that have taken place in publishing culture, technology, and English wordsmithing in Japan over four decades. Imoto Chikako’s article is based on an interview in Japanese with Saji at International House of Japan in October 2009.

SWET Cyber Matters

Red Card for Wordsmiths? SWET-L to the Rescue, by Torkil Christensen

Summary of threads on the mailing list SWET-L for the autumn and winter of 2009-2010. Wherein English stares at its second million words, Strunk & White mark their fiftieth, and the list remains attentively helpful but chides misspelling denizens of its cyber world.

Book Reviews

Selling Improved English, and the Dilemmas of Prescriptivism

Reviewed by John McCreery and Jens Wilkinson
Do You Make These Mistakes in English?: The Story of Sherwin Cody’s Famous Language School. By Edwin L. Battistella. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Hardcover, ISBN 978-0-19-536712-6.

A Semantic Adventure

Reviewed by Ginny Tapley Takemori
At Home in Japan: A Foreign Woman’s Journey of Discovery. By Rebecca Otowa. Tokyo: Tuttle Publishing, 2010. Hardcover, ISBN 978-4-8053-1078-6.