Which is odd, really. The number 95 doesn’t refer to the number of prime ministers who have headed up Japan’s government, beginning with Itō Hirobumi (whose first term was 1885–88). It’s the number of times a man has been formally selected by the Diet to serve as prime minister. Of course, it’s much easier to write “the ninety-fifth prime minister” than “the person selected to be prime minister in the ninety-fifth such selection by the Diet,” which is why we get this shorthand version in news coverage. This could be described as the ninety-fifth cabinet to form, but that excludes reshuffled cabinets that didn’t involve the Diet tapping the prime minister to serve another term.

I don’t think there’s a very compact way to express this count in English. The English Wikipedia page on Japan’s premiers through history calls this “administration number” as opposed to the number of individuals, but it’s rare to see similar language—and whatever added information would be needed to make it clear to readers—in media coverage of these handovers of power.

In the United States, we talk about Obama being the forty-fourth president, not the fifty-sixth, as he would be if we were counting terms like this Japanese system does. (Things are made sort of confusing by Grover Cleveland, who served two terms with someone else in between; he gets counted as both #22 and #24.) In Japan, though, the standard count is the higher number. Itō was the first prime minister. He was also the fifth, seventh, and tenth, with various other Meiji statesmen taking turns in between his terms.

Nobody needs to push you out of office for you to get a new prime ministership, though. Koizumi Jun’ichirō, the last premier with any staying power, was prime minister #87, #88, and #89. We’re about to get the sixth single-termer in the four years, 11 months that have passed since he left office. Can’t tell the players without a program!

* UPDATE: Who is Noda Yoshihiko.

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 moon is so blue tonight.”

(From Satō Kenji, “More Animated than Life: A Critical Overview of Japanese Animated Films,” Japan Echo, December 1997.)

I included that quote in a post here some time ago. The other day, it came back to mind during some searching through the Honyaku Archive, when I spotted:

Anyway, in a book titled 「あなたもSF作家になれる…わけではない」by SF writer 豊田有恒 (Toyota Aritsune) (徳間文庫）there is a passage on page 230 that goes:

夏目漱石が、英語の授業のとき、学生たちに、 I love you. を訳させた話は有名です。学生たちは、「我、汝を愛す」とか、「僕は、そなたを、愛しう思う」とかいう訳を、ひねりだしました。

「おまえら、それでも、日本人か？」漱石は、一喝してから、つけくわえたということです。「日本人は、そんな、いけ図々しいことは口にしない。これは、月がとっても青いなあーと訳すものだ」

なるほど、明治時代の男女が、人目をしのんで、ランデブーをしているときなら、「月がとっても青いなあ」と言えば、 I love you. の意味になったのでしょう。もっとも、現在では、ここまで凝らなくても、直訳でも通じるはずです。ただし、文化的な発想の違いにぶるかって、面くらうことは、まだまだ、たくさんあります。

Very belated thanks to Kevin Kirton for tracking this down in 2001. In another post in that same thread, Emily Shibata-Sato offers:

A similar example is by 二葉亭四迷 (Futabatei Shimei) who, in his translation of ツルゲーネフ, used 死んでもいいわ for ”I love you.”

All interesting stuff. Persuasive arguments against computers managing to translate literature effectively anytime soon, too. (Once again, if you’d like to read that Japan Echo article, let me know and I will see if I can get a scan of it into a PDF for you.)

Did I say “person”? I meant “huge list of people, companies, and other assorted entities.” A picture of a manga character can involve a consortium of toy manufacturers, film distributors, TV broadcasters, banks, advertising firms, and, somewhere in there, the people who actually invented and drew the character in the first place. On more than one occasion the demands to have a stupidly long photo credit attached to the image (with certain firm names in SCREAMING CAPS for no reason, of course) have led us to give up on posting the image in the first place. “© Jiji” is fine; “© 2008 BANDAI CO. LTD., Toho Co. Ltd., HAKUHODO Inc., Fuji Television Network Inc., On and On and On. All Rights Reserved. In fact, don’t even look at this one.” is more lines of text than we want on our page. It gets to the point where it isn’t worth it.

Not sure why that's doubled up there.

Something that struck my eye a while back was this: Nibariki-GNDHDDTW. Ugh! But wait, that’s actually a rather page-layout-friendly thing the consortium in question has done for publishers like us. This page (in Japanese) had the explanation I needed:

• Nibariki = The company that handles rights issues for Miyazaki Hayao’s work. (This is housed in a cool-looking building south of the Chūō Line just east of Mitaka Station with a sod roof. The grass gets pretty crazy in the late autumn; I imagine it’s an eco-friendly structure. Click here for a Google Maps street view of it.)
• G = Studio Ghibli.
• N = Nippon Television.
• D = Dentsū Inc.
• H = Hakuhōdō DY Media Partners.
• D = The Walt Disney Company.
• D = Mitsubishi Corp. (My guess is that “D” comes from “diamond,” since the company’s name means “three diamonds.”)
• T = Toho Co.
• W = Wild Bunch (which appears to handle European distribution). Not included in all credits, but it’s in this gang at least part of the time.

If we had to spell all that out just to stick a picture of Ponyo into an article on Japanese cultural exports, we might have left her up to the readers’ imaginations instead. As ugly as the alphabet soup looks, it’s actually a relatively welcome option to have.

On the subject of these consortia, I recommend reading a post on Matt Alt’s blog titled “Risky Business.”

Fans tend to romanticize the anime world as one of unbridled creative freedom. The reality is a vicious cycle in which production committees not only dictate the content (as they will only fund the series they feel are solid investments) but keep the majority of the profits (as animation studios have traditionally only been paid a fixed sum, without royalties, for their work.) The vast majority of the men and women who actually create the stuff toil in poverty and obscurity, because they are at the absolute bottom of the food chain.

An excellent report linked there (PDF) is Capitalizing on Innovation: The Case of Japan. Distressing stuff about the Japanese anime industry begins on page 20.

That post is from 2009, but I only saw it today when he linked it from his “Project A” entry. The government has finally scrounged up some funds for animators in Japan as part of its loudly advertised “cool Japan” soft power push—just a few million yen, but it’s probably the first worthwhile spending in that entire misguided effort. Alt sounds the “underfunded creators” warning again:

In spite of what the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry would have you believe about “Cool Japan,” the anime industry is in serious trouble. Perhaps the biggest problem is that appallingly low salaries have hollowed out the talent pool to the point where even Academy Award winning directors like Hayao Miyazaki can’t pull together enough people to animate an entire film by hand anymore. But finally, it seems, the Japanese government has started putting their money where their mouth is.

Another good post of his covering some similar ground is “State of the Anime Industry 2009.” Um, just go stick him in your RSS reader. He’s worth the read.

This isn’t a particularly splendid translation of mine, but I’m tossing it out there as a general example of how I tend to zip through a quick translation when it lands on my desk. One shortcoming of this approach to sharing the translation process with others is that it doesn’t let you indicate where you went offline to look at a dictionary or other reference. I did stick in a couple URLs that I used while putting the text together, though. This translation was for a competitive bid on a project that our company ended up not getting—not sure if that’s because my translation was outclassed or because our price outclassed all the others. Oh well.

There are two texts to translate: one selected from the “novels” category and one from “critiques and essays.” The contest goes from Japanese into English and German this year, and translators of any nationality or age (except for those who’ve been published before, drat) are welcome to participate. The deadline for applications is the end of November this year.

You can get more information and download PDFs of the texts to be translated at http://www.jlpp.go.jp/ (or jump straight to the contest details in Japanese or English). I couldn’t spot any information on the prizes involved, but they may include publication of the winning works somewhere.

The general feeling among researchers is that translators will continue to play a central role in production of the high quality translation well into the future. They will also inevitably contribute to the fine-tuning and repairing of MT output as post-editors through the feedback loops that are vital to optimizing MT systems. The gradual build up of postedited texts will then turn into a huge body of potentially decisive training data for MT systems.

There will naturally be more research into ways in which this symbiotic relationship can be optimized within the various types of workflows, with improved toolsets for post-editors. But it seems unlikely that there will be anything more than incremental advances in performance for the industry as a whole. We can expect forward-looking technical translators to adopt new power tools emerging from such research to stay competitive.

[snip]

As to the old fantasy of the perfect artificial translator, the hypothesis on the table is that a system capable of systematically aping (or even surpassing) a human translator will need to draw on ‘world models’ – real-world knowledge – to overcome the critical quality bottleneck. But it has so far proved impossible to program a machine to understand the semantic intentionality of a text.

Nice to see some writing on this issue that doesn’t shy away from the fact that as good as the computers are likely to get, they aren’t going to approach the depth of human mastery and replace us “any day now.”

You’ll never know exactly what a translator has done. He reads with maniacal attention to nuance and cultural implication, conscious of all the books that stand behind this one; then he sets out to rewrite this impossibly complex thing in his own language, re-elaborating everything, changing everything in order that it remain the same, or as close as possible to his experience of the original. In every sentence the most loyal respect must combine with the most resourceful inventiveness. Imagine shifting the Tower of Pisa into downtown Manhattan and convincing everyone it’s in the right place; that’s the scale of the task. Writing my own novels has always required a huge effort of organisation and imagination; but, sentence by sentence, translation is intellectually more taxing. On the positive side, the hands-on experience of how another writer puts together his work is worth a year’s creative writing classes. It is a loss that few writers “stoop” to translation these days.

From “Why translators deserve some credit,” by Tim Parks.

Chop into pieces; cry.

This final editing stage can be tough. When I handle it on these texts, I might be dealing with the output of three or four translators. It’s a chore to go through all their contributions, making sure the serial commas are struck out (if the client doesn’t like them), adjusting spellings to US or UK English as needed, and making sure we don’t call a “law” an “act” five pages later. And the clock is ticking.

It’s possible to turn out a quality translation in these conditions because I’m dealing with (a) talented, experienced translators, (b) who have all worked on similar documents in the past, and (c) all had access to the entire text as they worked, so they could confirm how their chunk fit into the whole or note that the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry would be spelled out in full on page 2 so they could use “METI” on page 14. But there are a growing number of companies selling crowdsourced solutions that can’t afford (a), can’t guarantee (b), and actively reject (c) as part of their work process.

I’m afraid I forgot who brought this to our attention on JAT List, but here it is: from the New York Times, “At Microtask and CloudCrowd, Assembly Lines Go Online.” Innovative businesspeople finding ways to innovate every last drop of quality right out of a translation by breaking it into as many parts as possible and giving nobody a look at the whole text:

CloudCrowd, based in San Francisco, also offers to distribute clients’ work online. Like Microtask, it has found ways to break work into thin slices.

“Rather than crowdsourcing, we call what we do widesourcing,” says Mark Chatow, the company’s vice president for marketing. “We take tasks like translation that used to be done by a single specialist and break them into pieces so a wide range of people can handle different parts of the work.”

CloudCrowd uses machine translation software to make a first pass. Then it sends out individual pages of the machine’s translation to garble hunters, who look for sentences containing a nonsensical sequence. A translator with native language fluency is needed only for the sentences tagged by the garble hunter. An editor, without foreign language expertise, then polishes the prose, but possesses only a single page, not a chapter or the entire work.

CloudCrowd exclusively uses Facebook members who come to it for assignments; it says it has 50,000 workers in its crowd. Traditional translation costs about 20 to 25 cents a word, Mr. Chatow, says, but “we’re doing it for 6.7 cents a word.” He says translators make an average of $15 an hour and garble hunters around $7 an hour.

And then comes the money quote:

Mr. Miettinen of Microtask says, “Pure monetary compensation is a 20th-century concept.” He envisions tapping the talents of game designers who would render clickwork fun, what he calls “game-ification.” If successful, it could minimize complaints about pitiful pay or soul-draining boredom.”

Now there may indeed be a major market for this stuff—texts for which clients don’t have a budget for real translation, but which need to be a little bit more readable than Google’s MT gibberish. But it remains to be seen whether 6.7 cents per word is the magic point at which the total lack of consistency and polish across your hundred-translator document can be overlooked in favor of the vaguely passable grammar in each sentence.

It also remains to be seen whether Mr. Miettinen remains mired in that twentieth-century concept of paying himself a handsome salary from his pool of venture capital.

It's art!

Science-fiction writer Charlie Stross rants about the current state of steampunk fiction in “The hard edge of empire.” I don’t think I’ve ever read a single thing in this genre, and all the names he tosses out go right over my head, but this caught my eye:

It’s just that there’s too damn much [steampunk] about right now, and furthermore, it’s in danger of vanishing up its own arse due to second artist effect. (The first artist sees a landscape and paints what they see; the second artist sees the first artist’s work and paints that, instead of a real landscape.)

It got me thinking about how this “second artist effect” shows up in translation, too. There are of course lots of cases where you need to keep your eye on the way things have been written before—you want stuff to be consistent, and hell, the entire CAT industry is built on the concept of recycling previously translated phrases as much as possible. But for certain sorts of texts (literary ones, mainly, although ad copy definitely falls in here) I think it might benefit the translator to step back and forget all about ways things have been translated in the past.

I think translators are frequently guilty of paying more attention to what other translators have produced already than to what the source text writer is saying right now. That’s what counts the most.

Stross’s blog is a good one to follow. He wrote a series of pieces on the publishing industry, which I mentioned previously, and he has a great entry on his trip to Japan that addresses the whole “wow, man, Japan is just so different” issue without the broad-brush cultural comparisons and other idiocy that usually inspires in bloggers. Also it includes stuff like:

Tokyo left me feeling like an illiterate Albanian shepherd teleported without warning to the UK, staring slack-jawed in wonder at the vast, gleaming, powerful public works of metropolitan Huddersfield, reeking of wealth and efficiency and a goat-free future.

(Image is from a painting in the collection of the Museum of Bad Art.)

It sounds like Murakami is the sort of source-text writer every translator would love to work with:

Q: When you have questions on your translation, how do you approach him? Could you give us a recent example of questions?

A: I e-mail him or his editor at Shinchosha Publishing Co. He is a good e-mail correspondent. Many passages of “1Q84″ could be translated into either first or third person, and I have asked him which he prefers in certain cases. He usually advises me to do whatever works best in English.

A few more interesting bits on the translation process:

Q: Murakami sometimes directly incorporates English phrases into his novel. Does that fit well in your translation? For example, in “Nejimaki-dori Kuronikuru” (The Wind-up Bird Chronicle), he used the phrase, “Kojinteki ni toranaide kure,” which is obviously from “Don’t take it personally.”

A: The problem is to translate it “back” into English that is as unusual as the Japanese, but often I lazily go for the “original” English expression. This way, the batakusasa (Western air) of Murakami’s style is lost. Sorry.

Q: Tell me something about your translation process. Do you read the book all the way through first before starting on the translation?

A: Yes, I always read the work first in case there are special key phrases that need to be handled in a certain way from the beginning. I get up early in the morning and work until my brain turns into tofu, which is usually around 11:30 a.m. My brain is not of much use for the rest of the day.

Worth a read. I edit and translate a bunch of content for Japanese Book News, and over the last couple of years it’s gotten somewhat tiresome to include news blurb after news blurb about this book. Maybe after this “English translation finally published” news blurb we can move on to something else . . . at least until Murakami pumps out a fourth volume.