Yesterday I went to a symposium hosted by the Nippon Foundation. The foundation brought a pretty stellar group of fiction editors from Britain and the United States to talk about comparisons between the fiction publishing scenes in the English-speaking world and in Japan, the role of editors and agents, and what they look for when [...]
Archive for the ‘translation’ Category
Simpler subtitling
Here’s one from the “stuff I saved and meant to write about at some point” file. I’ve been inspired to get it up on the web by a spate of Toda Natsuko appearances on TV—she’s traipsing around with Sylvester Stallone and Dolph Lundgren, who are doing the variety show circuit to drum up interest in [...]
The fine art of translation . . .
. . . lies in not making the baby throw up. So once you get over the frustration at having to translate what you think is nonsense, take a deep breathe and ask yourself: “what is this text really trying to say, and how can I convey that with minimum disruption to the intended reader?” [...]
On chess and computers
A quick quote from “The Chess Master and the Computer” in the New York Review of Books: The AI crowd, too, was pleased with the result and the attention, but dismayed by the fact that Deep Blue was hardly what their predecessors had imagined decades earlier when they dreamed of creating a machine to defeat the world [...]
My bookshelf
Like the title says. These are some of the paper references I use in my work as a translator and editor. (The links take you to amazon.co.jp pages on the things.) Of course I do plenty of research and look up lots of terms online, but Wikipedia and Google and so on have yet to [...]
