J-J dictionaries

大辞林 – I have this in paper, as well as in data for use in Logophile; I even bought the iPhone app too since it’s so nicely done there.

広辞苑 – This is considered the “standard” J-J dictionary, but I don’t like it as much as things like 大辞林 and 大辞泉 (another one I have at home) since it lists definitions in their historical order, so you have to wade through a bunch of archaic meanings before you get to what words mean today. (See what lexicon whiz Tom Gally has to say about this in his very informative page on Japanese [国語] dictionaries.) That said, it’s a classic reference and as such it has a place on my shelf, as well as in data form in Logophile.

Some good 漢和辞典. These seem to have fallen by the wayside to a greater extent than anything else in my collection, but I do browse through them from time to time.

The 日本国語大辞典 by Shōgakukan is one I use at the office. I don’t have my own copy because it costs nearly ¥200,000 to assemble all the volumes; that Amazon link is just for volume 1. But this is the Japanese answer to the OED, basically: the biggest out there.

Also in the “have it at the office and lack shelf space for it at home” category is the 日本大百科全書, or Encyclopedia Nipponica. I do have this in data format as well. It came with a Sony electronic dictionary my wife was kind enough to get for me for my birthday some years ago. It is also searchable via Logophile, which makes it very handy indeed.

J-E dictionaries

Kenkyusha’s New Japanese-English Dictionary – This is called the “green goddess” by translators for its cover color; it’s a standard reference. (The E-J version is the “brown behemoth.”) The fifth edition is a fantastic improvement on the fourth and deserves a place on the serious learner’s bookshelf. A CD-ROM version is also available. You can also purchase online access to a frequently updated version.

The New Nelson Japanese-English Character Dictionary – The best-known of all the 漢英 Japanese resources. This (well, the second revised edition) is the book I used in my university days to pound kanji into my head.

Bungo Manual – This little book is a great one for advanced learners who want to puzzle out the meanings of some older forms in the language. Classical Japanese isn’t something you need to be able to read on a daily basis, but exposure to its forms will help you decipher a lot of the things that you do see in use in Japanese to this day.

A Dictionary of Japanese Food – This slender volume has come in handy a number of times. Nice to have as a general reference when living in Japan, even if you aren’t a translator.

E-E references

Webster’s New World College Dictionary – This is our desk dictionary at the office; that means it decides how we spell things for our publications (unless a client tells us otherwise). We use this in conjunction with the Webster’s New World Speller/Divider, which is a small book with sturdy pages for rapid flipping. A much better choice when you’re proofing a layout and want to quickly confirm a word’s spelling or a hyphenation choice. Perhaps not so useful to people not in the publishing industry, though.

The Chicago Manual of Style – Our house style guide at Japan Echo Inc. It looks like the 16th edition will be coming out later this summer. We have an additional guide about 10 pages long to set down our rules for things not covered in Chicago; many of these match the rules you can find in . . .

Japan Style Sheet – This little style guide is put out by the Society of Writers, Editors, and Translators and is worth owning if you do any writing on Japan.

Other style guides. One major client prefers that we use the Associated Press Stylebook (AP just came out with a new edition that I need to pick up). I also have the Economist and New York Times manuals for my own reading pleasure.

There’s also a handy little book called 和英翻訳データブック put out by the Japan Times. This one, and its predecessor (英文ライターのための和英翻訳ハンドブック), have largely been replaced by the Web when it comes to searching for the official English name of some government department or whatever, but when I’m translating a text that refers to the central bureaucracy as it stood in the 1990s, say, these are lifesavers. If JT ever puts out a new version I’ll likely get it too. Handy little Japan references for translators and reporters.

The history

The journal Japan Echo got its start in 1974. From the beginning it was positioned as a channel for high-quality translations of Japanese views on Japan: at the time the country’s leaders were concerned that the Japanese voice wasn’t reaching the world as it should, and this was one move to help develop a persuasive global presence for the country as a more complex place than simply the home to a bunch of industrious radio and auto manufacturers.

Just as importantly, from the beginning the magazine—and the company producing it—was structured so as to prevent it from being a government mouthpiece. Mochida Takeshi, the firm’s first president, laid down rules that said Japan Echo Inc. would never take on “OBs” from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs or other government agencies. This kept the organization from turning into yet another amakudari playground for senior bureaucrats. At the same time, he carved out an editorial stance for the magazine that kept it able to select from the broadest possible range of Japanese journals for its source materials. There were no limits to what could be selected by the (again, governmentally independent) editorial board for translation and publication. (There were other limits in place, though, which I’ll get to in a bit.)

This continued through 2009, and volume 36 of the magazine. Most of our readers during these decades likely obtained their copies courtesy of the Japanese government, as the Foreign Ministry purchased part of our print run and distributed it via Japan’s embassies and consulates to university libraries, government agencies, and researchers all around the world. MOFA was always our largest institutional subscriber in this sense, and our primary source of revenue for the magazine. (In the early years this was synonymous with the company as a whole, but over time we’ve developed a much more diverse set of clients and we make our money translating and publishing stuff for all sorts of public- and private-sector outfits today.)

When the end came, it was due to jigyō shiwake, the Democratic Party of Japan’s process of shaking waste out of public spending on various projects. The DPJ examiners judged that government ministries had no business purchasing magazines in bulk from private publishers. This put an end to the Japanese-language Gaikō Forum as well as our production. Vol. 37, No. 2 of Japan Echo was published in April 2010, bringing the magazine to its end.

You can see more on the magazine’s history and end in the essays from its publisher and editor in chief in the final issue.

What’s changed

Japan Echo Web is online now. Some of us would have preferred an entirely new name for this thing, given its new format, but the powers that be made the choice to keep “Japan Echo” in there. There are still some significant differences between what’s online now and what was once put out on paper, though.

First, it is no longer an independently published journal. This is a Ministry of Foreign Affairs project, as noted on the site’s “about” page. While the editorial board remains mostly the same as before, and we have the same people working on the production side, MOFA has more say over what does and does not go into it. As Shiraishi Takashi writes in his opening comment, “In order to keep the publication from being government propaganda, though the views of the Foreign Ministry are to be considered, the editor in chief is to have final say over the editorial content.” This is no promise that the consideration of MOFA views will be minimal, though. It’s something to watch.

Second, it is no longer drawing on the same source texts. Japanese copyright law states that we have to get permission from the author and publisher of a Japanese article if we want to publish it in English, and while most authors (with a few notable exceptions over the years) love seeing their stuff made available via the web to a global audience, the publishers of the monthly magazines like Bungei Shunjū and Sekai tend to deny permission to publish such translations online. There are a hundred thousand blogs out there written by people who ignore these restrictions, or have no idea that they exist in the first place, but we don’t exactly have the same luxury.

The two major monthlies that are happy to let us translate their articles for online use are Voice (PHP Institute) and Chūō Kōron (Chūō Kōron Shinsha). So you can expect to see articles chosen from their pages, along with interviews we do ourselves and pieces we commission from academics and government officials and so on.

Third, it’s going to be updated more than once every two months. We’ll be posting major articles on a monthly basis, with two months’ worth representing a single “issue” of the journal as before. (And there will in fact be a printed edition of articles selected from the site, published every two months; that will mainly be for MOFA’s own distribution purposes, though, so you won’t see it on the Kinokuniya shelves.) There are also blog entries from members of the editorial board, which we hope to get up on a weekly basis. Not exactly the sort of thing to set your RSS reader on fire, but the translation and editing do take time.

What’s still the same

Japan Echo Web is still translated by the same native-English-speaking translators, checked by the same talented Japanese checkers, and edited with the same care as our print version was. We have the same house style as before, so the voice of this content should be the same as what you know from the magazine days. You don’t get to see my name in there as “senior editor” any more, but it’s still me looking over the texts any number of times before they go out.

And . . . that’s it, really. It’s a whole new ball game other than this. For now we’re still creating this publication, but as our editor in chief notes in his inaugural comment, we won the right to do this in a competitive bidding process that will be repeated each year going forward. Hardly an efficient way to do things—government rules mandate a 40-day period for entrants to prepare their bid packages, and then there are presentations and judging that take place, so you end up losing two months of each year that could be spent preparing an entire magazine’s worth of content instead. We’d love to see this changed to a three- or even five-year contract, but in the present political climate this hardly seems likely.

There are dozens of other little things I could add to this post: All the design decisions that I’m not crazy about but that had to be made for various reasons. The chance that there will be a “Japan Echo” branded publication in the hands of a different company that underbids us for a future annual contract. For the time being, though, we’re live and there’s fresh content to prepare for the big update later this month, so back to work.

Happy reading!

The office is in central Tokyo, handy to Kasumigaseki, Toranomon, and other stations. The work provides good variety, including stuff in the arts and humanities, although the focus tends to be on texts dealing with government, economy, and international relations.

While of course you shouldn’t take anything I write on my personal website as a promise, there’s the possibility of a contract extension in 2011 or even a shift to 正社員 status depending on how much work we see coming down the pipe in the longer term and what we think of the individual’s skills.

If you’re interested, you’ll need to complete the trial translation available on our website [PDF] and send it in with your Japanese-language resume to work@japanecho.co.jp. The resume could be a standard 履歴書 format or something you roll yourself; it will be read by some people here who aren’t translators, though, so we do need it in the language of the land.

Make sure your materials reach us no later than June 15. If you have any questions about the position or the company, you can contact me. Feel free to forward or repost this information. Thanks!

The Department of East Asian Languages & Civilizations and the Committee on Japanese Studies at the University of Chicago are launching a new annual prize for translations related to Japanese literature and literary studies, broadly defined. Up to three awards will be made each year, and new translations of previously translated works are eligible. Please see the announcement below for details.

To honor their late colleague William F. Sibley, The Department of East Asian Languages & Civilizations and the Committee on Japanese Studies of the Center for East Asian Studies at the University of Chicago have established the William F. Sibley Memorial Translation Prize in Japanese Literature and Literary Studies.

In keeping with William Sibley’s lifelong devotion to translation and to the place of literature in the classroom, we will offer up to three awards of $2,500 each for the translation from Japanese into English of a work of fiction, poetry, or drama (including screenplays), or scholarship in literary studies, broadly understood. To encourage classroom use and comparative research, we will publish the winning entries on the Center for East Asian Studies website.

Submissions should be on the scale of short story rather than novel, on the one hand, but a body of poetry rather than single poems, on the other. Essays, reportage, and criticism are all genres for consideration. Retranslations of works previously translated, especially of premodern literature, may also be submitted. Each entry should be accompanied by an introduction of no more than 1,000 words presenting the significance of the work in Japan and its potential life in English. The rationale for retranslation should be separately addressed. The translation should be submitted along with the original in triplicate to Chair, Selection Committee, Sibley Memorial Translation Prize, Committee on Japanese Studies, 302 Judd Hall, 5835 S. Kimbark Ave., Chicago, IL 60637.

The competition will be held annually and judged by members of the Committee on Japanese Studies.

The deadline for the first competition is December 1, 2010.

The eighth and most recent entry, not linked on that index page at the moment, is called “Lifestyle or Job?” It gives some figures on author incomes that should scare you away if you’re thinking about getting rich as a writer. J-E translator incomes might be getting pinched by bargain-seeking clients and budget-slashing DPJ governments (more on that in an upcoming post), but I think we’ve still got it better than the folks who have to come up with their own ideas to put into words on the page.

I’m now on one of the newer Marunouchi Line trains, complete with TV screens to show ads to the captive commuter eyeballs. Another set of screens give us train-related info, though. I’m attaching a photo of what these screens are displaying right now.

The English translation is crap, as is probably to be expected. (Train dwell time? Really?) But the “OR” in there caught my eye. I wonder if some translator decided to give the Tokyo Metro client multiple options for this text—which basically means “we’re going to sit at this station for a while so we don’t open up a gap between this train and the one behind us or run into the one in front of us”—and the client stuck all the options right into the system.

Not quite as exciting as the spare pricks on the Narita Express, but this is about as titillating as it gets on a Monday evening Marunouchi ride.

(I’m posting this as the very first effort from the WordPress app on my iPhone. If it’s screwy at all this carpenter plans to blame his tools.)

I think we’ve become more receptive to foreign elements. Constance Garnett, whom I will defend to the end of my days, is now criticized for not being faithful to Tolstoy’s text, for setting his books in what feels like an English garden, but in my view it cannot be bad when a translation gives people access to works that they would never otherwise have read. As I was saying, though, our taste for foreignness has increased. A simple example: 50 years ago, names of Chinese characters were translated—”Peach Blossom” and the like—whereas now the preference is for the transliterated Chinese names. There is an ongoing debate among translators about “foreignizing” and “domestication,” but wherever a translator’s choice falls, today it will probably be closer to foreignizing than it would have been 50 years ago.

Turning back the clock would let me write about Prime Minister Mountain of Doves, which would be fun.

First, Matt Treyvaud’s translation of Mori Ōgai’s 翻訳について (Hon’yaku ni tsuite; “On translation”):

The sweets that Nora eats I translated makuron マクロン. Write rather amedama 飴玉, I was told. Advice like this simply boggles the mind. Tins of almond macaroons have been shipped here in great number so that you may buy them at Aokido whenever you please. Reflect, if you will, on the difference in situation between a woman of the West eating a macaroon and a child of Japan eating an amedama. I recall one scene in a novel by someone-or-other wherein two female university students in Paris’s Latin Quarter munch on macaroons as they trade stories of heartbreak. To switch those macaroons for amedama, of all things—well, it would certainly be comical. The gist of such teachings is that items should appear in translation as appropriately chosen items unique to Japan, but as for myself, I strive to avoid things unique to Japan, the better to produce an extraordinary effect. Furthermore, we only consider here cases where there is an appropriate corresponding item. When uniquely Japanese and inappropriate items appear, the results are quite unbearable.

(Adamu of Mutantfrog Travelogue posted this entry in response to that Neojaponisme piece. Also interesting, especially the comment discussion there.)

Second is “Translator of the universal and the local,” a Japan Times interview with Meguro Jō, who has translated plays by Martin McDonagh (see also her blog):

How do you decide how “foreign” to make your translations?

Obviously there are cultural gaps, but I prefer to retain some unfamiliar things rather than ignore them or change them into something familiar for Japanese. I don’t think it’s right to rework foreign plays as if they were as natural and smooth as plays written in Japanese. We should keep some “foreignness.” Getting the balance right is quite sensitive and difficult. English four-letter words, such as f**k—which McDonagh includes a lot—must be translated case by case. Sometimes, I translate them to keep the rhythm, but sometimes I think it is better to cut them.

And third, there are of course cases where you can’t stick closely to the form of the original at all, so you have to get more creative if you want to get the same point across in your target language. I wrote about these so-called untranslatable terms a while ago.

This strict definition is the required approach in some types of work. If you’re working on a contract or some other legal document, or even a piece of business correspondence in some cases, your text could be brought into legal proceedings at some point. Will the lawyers be able to point to each term and phrase in the target text and indicate what it matches in the source? Word-for-word translations are what let them do so.

In the areas where I work, this usually isn’t the best approach, though. The translator’s job is sometimes closer to that of a copywriter—someone who writes a text with a certain goal in mind. This advertisement needs to make the reader want to buy our brand of beer, or think that we’re operating our business in an eco-friendly manner. This essay needs to convince the reader that our political position is the correct one, or that the other country’s view is mistaken. When you’re writing toward goals like these, you think more about the impact of the words you use in the target text. What do the readers need? What is their level of background knowledge? How will they react to what you write? Is their reaction what the writer of the source text, or your client, wants to see?

When I do a translation for a Japanese politician, the pendulum can swing to either extreme. This weekend I stayed up late translating on Friday night and did some editing on Saturday of part of Prime Minister Hatoyama’s Friday afternoon press conference (Japanese; for English go over here). For this client (the Kantei) we stick very closely to the Japanese—sentence order, phrasings within those sentences, you name it. In previous translations I’ve worked on for the Kantei (here’s one) we’ve resorted to [bracketing the information] that’s begrudgingly admitted to be necessary for comprehension. Example:

J: 第二次補正予算、そして平成２２年度予算の早期成立に全力を尽くします。
E: We will make every effort to secure the early passage of the second supplementary budget [of fiscal 2009] and the fiscal 2010 budget.

In a translation for Japan Echo magazine, I’d toss that “2009″ in before the supplementary budget without a second thought, but “Heisei 21″ wasn’t in the prime minister’s original words, so there you have it.

The English text I give a politician client might be something else, though, like a speech he’ll give before an English-speaking audience. It’s rare for that speech to look exactly like the source text provided to me. A Japanese speaker knows that Japanese listeners will understand certain concepts he covers without explanation. This isn’t the case with the English-speaking listeners, though. As I’m translating this document I think hard about the original words, of course, but I also consider the people who will hear what I’m writing. If the Japanese pol is talking about the upcoming upper house contest, and says something like 前回のきびしい選挙結果, will the listeners’ needs be met by “the brutal results of the last election”? In some cases, yes: maybe the speaker already laid down the background for this statement, or maybe the speech will be given before a bunch of scholars of Japanese politics who are up to speed on all of this. In other cases, I need to help them more: “the results for the previous election for the House of Councillors, held in July 2007, in which the ruling LDP suffered a serious setback.”

Not all those words were in the original text. But an informed Japanese listener would understand all that unspoken information—and for a speech, it’s often the translator’s job to make sure that the English listeners will come away with the same level of understanding.

Long story short: Translation choices get made depending on more than just the words in the source document. Take that, Google Translate!

(Edit: I just posted a quick follow-up to this one right here.)

(Edit 2: Added the English version of the prime minister’s press conference, which just went up. This time the client’s editor was content to make his own changes instead of sending the MS back to us for revisions, whew.)

Sound familiar? Well here’s a little something Younghusband at Coming Anarchy has shared with us:

>