So the voting is now underway for the Democratic Party of Japan’s presidency, and thus the next prime minister of Japan. Tomorrow all the papers will carry their pieces on “the ninety-fifth prime minister.”* Which is odd, really. The number 95 doesn’t refer to the number of prime ministers who have headed up Japan’s government, [...]
Archive for the ‘translation’ Category
Love, the moon, and translation
Natsume Soseki once taught his students that the correct Japanese translation for “I love you” is “Tsuki ga tottemo aoi naa” (The moon is so blue tonight); what he meant was that to express within the Japanese cultural framework the same emotion expressed in English by “I love you,” one must choose words like “The [...]
The terror of photo credits
When my company publishes things, sometimes we decide we’d like to have an image to go with the words. We find something worth printing or uploading, contact the person with the rights to that image, and ask for permission to publish—along with the person’s preference for attribution in the photo caption (or in tiny text [...]
Full Frontal Translation
That’s right, totally nude, letting you see it all. In December I posted about EtherPad, an online tool that lets you type up a document while keeping track of every single change made to it—every character typed, moved, replaced, or deleted. I went ahead and did a short translation with EtherPad last month, which you [...]
Literary translation contest
The Japanese Literature Publishing Project is running a literary translation competition “with a view to discovering and fostering brilliant translators who can help introduce and spread modern Japanese literature throughout the world.” It’s the first such contest run by the JLPP, and it seems to be similar to the Shizuoka International Translation Competition, sadly no [...]
