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About meArchives for July, 2004
Untranslatability
There was an interesting article on the BBC website a while back. It talked about the words chosen as “the most untranslatable” by a group of 1,000 linguists. They chose a doozy for the top spot:
The world’s most difficult word to translate has been identified as ilunga from the Tshiluba language spoken in south-eastern DR Congo. . . .
Ilunga means “a person who is ready to forgive any abuse for the first time, to tolerate it a second time, but never a third time”.
It was a fun read, but the article made a big mistake in the second paragraph I quoted above. It translated the word that was so untranslatable. How on earth did the BBC reporter, even assuming he had the help of that massive group of linguists, perform such a challenging task? The answer, of course, is that the word ilunga is perfectly translatable, just like all words.
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Sweating to the oldies
In this case, an oldie is a book about a guy who was born in the 1870s. Still working hard on it; this weekend I finished up one long chapter I was wrestling with for some time and then got a shorter chapter out of the way as well. Another weekend, another 10,000 words out of my fingers and into the computers.
Sweating, in this case, refers to sweat. It was another scorcher of a weekend. On Saturday we closed off the door to the tatami room (the one with the air conditioner in it) and cooled off. That evening we headed out to Musashi Koganei to see the awa-odori festival (Japanese site) and to drink some beer. Megumi wore a yukata. We took pics. Some will go up later.
Today was another day for work, but we went without the AC. Pant, pant. Lots of water to drink and lots of showers to take. In fact, after I post this I’m going to get this toasty PowerBook out of my lap and go take another one.
In other news, Jessica had knee surgery on Friday. I talked to her that afternoon (outpatient now, wow) and she was doing fine. She had a robo-knee, though–a knee pad that automatically circulated ice water through it, a little pump that stuck painkillers into her leg every once in a while, and a brace of some kind. Hope everything knits nicely!
An update: There’s a video of some of the dancing and crowds over on this page.
Panic weekend
It was a three-day weekend. A good time for catching up on sleep. I haven’t been getting much lately, because I usually work until 10 or 11 and then do an additional two or three hours of work once I get home. This book translation is going to wreck me even as it makes me rich and famous. It’s also too damn hot to sleep . . . It almost hit 40 degrees in Tokyo the other day, an all-time record for the city (which means that it was actually 43 or 44 in some parts of this concrete oven), and at night the temperature didn’t drop under 30 one night. Combine that with the normal humidity you get in a Japanese summer and you get people actually suffering heat stroke in their beds. Several folks have already died in their sleep this summer.
Anyway, on Friday I taught my last translation class. I stuck around in Shinjuku for a couple hours after that, and got on the train at about eleven and headed home and crashed. On Sunday evening I went to grab the PowerBook out of my backpack so I could upload the work the students did in class to my website . . . and the computer wasn’t there.
Doh.
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Hello?
Trying yet another piece of software . . . this time it’s the blog editor that lives inside of NetNewsWire. Let’s see if this works.
Buying books
I’ve been doing a bit of this lately. I was walking in Akasaka Mitsuke a few weekends ago when I saw Tokyo Random Walk for the first time. The place had some boxes of cheap (well, for Tokyo) paperbacks out front and I dug through them for a while. Found a copy of Virgil’s Aeneid for Y500 . . . I’ll read that after I get through the Iliad. This means I need to find time for that book first, though.
A week or so later I went down to Roppongi and had lunch with Michael Staley. We met at the Tsutaya behind the Roppongi Hills complex . . . I’d thought this was just a music and video rental joint, but this branch was a “fashionable book and coffee shop” with lots of massive coffee-table tomes. Actually we looked at a book about Muhammad Ali that would easily have crushed any coffee table I’ve ever seen. It was 50 centimeters tall and a meter wide when opened, and I’m sure it weighed close to 30 kilograms. Just a huge, huge chunk of dead trees. I can’t recall the price but it was well into the six-digit range.
(OK, after poking around a bit I learn that it was this book and that it’s selling for the low low price of $3,000 on Amazon.com. And it’s 34 kilograms.)
Since I only had my small backpack that day I went for this little book of freeware fonts, complete with CD. Lots of them look fun to play with, and it was easier to drop a little money for this book than it would be to track down all these letters online. Watch me go overboard and turn this website into something that looks like a kidnapper’s ransom note.
Cut to yesterday. I’m tired of the way my website looks and I want to do something about it, but I need more skills. So I’m going to learn CSS properly. So I need some books. I went online and ordered up a couple references: Eric Meyer on CSS and his programmer’s reference that comes with it in an Amazon package deal. As soon as these get here I will absorb their wisdom and make this place a lean thing of bleeding-edge beauty, to be sure.
But I don’t have time for that! Because I’m translating a book. It’s a biography of Noguchi Hideyo, the microbiologist who isolated the agent that causes syphilis. It’s long and dry and written by an elderly fellow whose style is not as vigorous as it could be. Anyhow, I learned that there was another English biography out on this guy, written by one Gustav Eckstein and published in 1931. There are a few copies available in Japan, at the Waseda library and elsewhere, but I found a used copy online at a place called Biblio.com. Just $10, plus shipping, is getting me a copy of this old book, which should come in quite handy . . . I can find all sorts of detailed information on Noguchi in Japanese but since I need to write about him in English it will be nice to get some input in that language as well.
While I was at Biblio.com I threw Who Needs Donuts? into the search form and found out that the nicest copy of the original 1973 book costs almost $300. And that’s with a child’s name scrawlied inside the cover in red pen. The copy I had as a kid still lives in San Rafael, but it’s covered in the ink of three misguided kids who thought their hands were steady enough to stay within those tiny, detailed lines. Probably only worth $100 or so. But the copy that T and Leslie got for me . . . ooh, that’s pristine. It’s got to be the most valuable book I own. Very cool!
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