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About meArchives for February, 2007
Congress gets its rock on
Fun stuff spotted at the Foreign Policy blog:
Publishing shenanigans
- An Australian journalist writes a book on Princess Masako and the Japanese imperial family.
- Japan Times writer Eric Johnston announces that he has been grossly misquoted in the book, registers his disappointment in shoddy reporting from a Walkley Award (prestigious Australian journalism prize) winner. This announcement was available here until Arudou removed it, apparently at Johnston’s request.
- Japanese publisher Kodansha is working on the Japanese translation of the book.
- The Foreign Ministry complains about the book’s factual inaccuracies to the author and publisher, sending letters via the embassy in Australia (one from Ambassador Ueda and one from the Imperial Household Agency). This is described in Japanese on the MOFA site but it hasn’t been translated into English.
- Kodansha announces it has called off publication of the Japanese version of the book.
The Japan Times has an article in which Kodansha explains its reasons for calling off the project:
Kazunobu Kakishima, an editor at Kodansha, denied the company was scrapping the translation because of the government’s protest. The decision, he said, came after Hills refused to acknowledge making factual errors during an interview with Japanese television earlier Friday.
“We have come to the conclusion that it is impossible to maintain trustworthy relations with the author and thus we were forced to cancel the book,” he said.
Kakishima said a “substantial number of factual errors” have been corrected through fact-checking and meetings with interviewees quoted in the book. Kakishima declined to describe any specific errors, citing privacy.
Hills, Kakishima said, acknowledged the errors in discussions with Kodansha, approved corrections in a translated draft and even thanked the publisher for the changes.
It’s interesting to compare this with the translation project for Iris Chang’s book some years ago. The Japanese publisher pointed out problems in that text and offered to make corrections in the translation, but the deal got scrapped when Chang refused to let anything be changed. (At least this is the version I’ve heard.) In Chang’s case, though, I don’t believe there was any governmental pressure brought to bear.
Which is as it should be. The MOFA person at the February 13 press conference noted that the government had to step up and say something about Hills’s book because the imperial family is the symbol of Japan, and to write terrible things about the clan is to humiliate the entire nation. But if the government intends to make this a part of its job, it’s got an awful lot of book policing ahead of it, even assuming it only intends to pay attention to books that are about to get translated into Japanese. Best just to stay out of the whole fact-checking process.
(Every once in a while I get asked to translate or proofread a letter to the editor of some publication, usually a newspaper or weekly newsmag, that has written something going against the grain of Japan’s official position on some matter. Maybe this is a normal part of the everyday duties of a diplomatic corps. Does the State Department ever draft letters in Japanese to send off to the Yomiuri and Asahi et al.?)
Jun Okumura writes that “journalists should be held to the same standards that they hold the rest of us to.” Which is true, but according to that Kodansha editor above, he was being held to those standards, and the Japanese version of the book was going to be an improvement on the flawed English one. But then he went on TV and made an ass of himself, which is apparently reason enough for the government to get involved in making pronouncements on which books are and are not worthy. I don’t see it. It’s a waste of effort when you have that fleet of black trucks out there to do the publisher-pressuring job for you.
Losing linguistic diversity (?!)
Noooooooooo! Do not want! According to this Seattle Times piece, China is getting serious about cleaning up the insane English translations that can now be seen on signs in its cities. Something to do with avoiding embarrassment when the Olympic guests roll into Beijing next year.
For years, foreigners in China have delighted in the loopy English translations that appear on the nation’s signs. They range from the offensive — “Deformed Man,” outside toilets for the handicapped — to the sublime — “Show Mercy to the Slender Grass,” on park lawns.
Last week, Beijing city officials unveiled a plan to stop the laughter. With hordes of foreign visitors expected in town for the 2008 Summer Olympics, Beijing wants to cleanse its signs of translation nonsense.
For the next eight months, 10 teams of linguistic monitors will patrol the city’s parks, museums, subway stations and other public places searching for gaffes to fix.
The guy heading this effort is Chen Lin, a professor who “got hooked on English in high school by reading simplified versions of Shakespeare” and was sent to a rural labor camp to rid his mind of those evil Western ways during the Cultural Revolution. It’s a great thing that he’s made it back from those dark days to his current posiition of influence, but it will be sad when he makes beautiful menus like this harder to find.
Translation topics
A few links to stuff online that I’ve been meaning to write about . . .
The Monumenta Nipponica Style Sheet
A complete PDF is available on the web. At my company we have our own style sheet (a senpai gave a presentation on it at the IJET conference held last year in Kobe), and I spend time looking at other examples of such things when I can. The disaster that is my desk sports plenty of book-length guides: Chicago, the Associated Press, the Economist, the New York Times. Most of our own work is done according to Chicago rules, with extra guidelines we’ve come up with to handle Japanese text and other things not covered in that book. (SWET’s Japan Style Sheet is another good one to have on hand for those issues.)
World literature: Found in translation
This article from the Christian Science Monitor notes that less than 3% of all books published in English are translations from other tongues, and talks about groups that have sprung up to raise that percentage. Given the massive amounts of English publications coming out each year I’m not sure this ratio is out of line with what’s “proper,” but as a translator I can’t complain about folks making efforts to increase the size of my industry. So more power to them. I’ve done some work for the Japanese Literature Publishing and Promotion Center, which is taking money from the government and putting it toward just this kind of activity. In November 2006 Kodansha announced a new grant program that gives up to $10,000 to a foreign publisher willing to take on the translation and publication of a work from the company’s list. Not nearly enough to pay the full cost of translating, editing, and printing a book, but it does take a chunk out of those costs.
Found in translation: a life’s passion
This is an interview with Tran Thien Dao, a French-to-Vietnamese (and vice versa) translator. Interesting read, but he says some eyebrow-raising things about the transparent role of the translator:
I’ve always believed translators are like monkeys. When an author raises his or her hand, the monkey must mirror the action, also raising its hand. Translators must interpret the exact meaning of what the author wrote and respect the author’s literary style. If a translator makes a boring work interesting in his or her translation, then he or she has betrayed the author. If the author writes incoherently, the translator must stay true to the text. One must keep in mind that you should never translate a piece word by word, or you’ll lose the writing’s context. . . .
Another thing people need to know is that translation is not a creative process. If a translator uses his or her imagination, it is a mistake.
I’m the first to admit to having monkeylike qualities, oop oop, but nine times out of ten the above approach will create a stupid translation. It seems sensible to say “you mustn’t add or subtract information in the process of a faithful translation,” but there are problems here. First, Words aren’t the same as information. Japanese readers, for instance, bring contextual understanding to the table when they approach a Japanese text, and something like 田園調布から川崎へ引っ越さざるを得なかった means more to them than simply “I had to move from Den’en Chofu to Kawasaki.” A faithful translation should be able to get all that extra info across: I was living in the ritzy Den’en Chofu district, but I had to move to a more run-down area in Kawasaki. Second, what Tran Thien Dao has to say might hold more water when it comes to literature, but in commercial translation we’re always removing things (too many words for the printed page!) and making boring texts more exciting (thanks, this will work much better in our marketing packet!) and so on.
『匂いをかがれるかぐや姫』を読んで
Last but not least, here’s a piece (in Japanese) on what was probably the easiest translation project ever to make it into book form. Step one: choose some beloved Japanese folktales. Step two: run them through a computer translation package into English and back again into Japanese. Step three: um, you’re done. Clean up the copy a bit and print! Fun examples from the book in that article include this parsing error:
- Original: 「がんばってくるんだぞ」
- J to E: “It was wrapped hard”
- E to J: 「それは一生懸命包装」
and this refreshingly direct approach to individual kanji meanings:
- Original: 仏様
- J to E: France state
- E to J: フランス状態
Good times. It’s something to consider next time I’m working on a project. Or rather, “That considering the following time which I have tackled project is something.”
Building a better donut
Spotted in the International Herald Tribune: “Need your caffeine fix? Have a doughnut.” Sounds like pure genius to me.
Dr. Robert Bohannon may be your new best friend. Bohannon is the North Carolina molecular biologist who six years ago sat down before a glass of milk and a doughnut and had the audacity to think that there was something wrong with that picture. Why not add caffeine — to the doughnut?
A normal person would stop right there and call out for a latte. Someone who had been chewing coffee beans since he was 8 would call out for a kilogram of food-grade caffeine. With the help of a local baker, Bohannon set about attempting to create what he had already named: the Buzz Donut.
The early results were disappointing; “they tasted like aluminum cans,” he says. Grainy versions followed. As of this week, perfection has been achieved and a patent filed. Bohannon is now waiting for Krispy Kreme and Dunkin’ Donuts — do trans fats somehow impair the ability to spell? — to call.
It’s a busy world we live in, and I’m all for time-saving efficiencies like this. Eat the donut as you dash to the station, and you get your morning jolt without worrying that the coffee is going to splash all over your coat and make you brown and stinky. Admittedly that’s a handy way to get a little more elbow room on a crowded train . . . Maybe lots of caffeinated crumbs stuck in your beard would help you cultivate that same air of STAY AWAY, though.
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