The Telegraph has an article on some of the more interesting working conditions I’ve heard of in the translation business: “Dan Brown’s Inferno: the hellish conditions endured by those translating author’s new blockbuster.” The guy’s latest “mysterious religious/artistic stuff happens but brave American academic is up to the task” novel is going to be released [...]
Archive for the ‘translation’ Category
Japan Echo on the Edo period
In 2003 Tokyo celebrated the four-hundredth anniversary of its designation as Japan’s political capital. In that year and the next, Japan Echo magazine commissioned a series of articles by Edo-period specialists outlining interesting and little-known details of life in and one of the world’s greatest cities of that age. They’re still available online, in all [...]
Cabinet numbers
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, [...]
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 [...]
