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!

Mmmm, links. Oddly enough these things don’t show up at all for me when I view the site with Safari 4.0.x. For those of you who’ve spotted the things, what were you using to do so? (Are they designed to stay invisible to a person logged in as an administrator, I wonder?)

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.

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

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Some of the maps are Japanese productions, but others were taken (stolen?) from other sources. The maps of Guam, for instance, appear to have come from the US Corps of Engineers and Navy Department, and have Japanese text overlaid on them; many of the maps of Indonesia are Dutch in origin. Fun to browse through, even if you don’t have a pressing research need. (I titled this post “Asia,” but the maps extend to charts of Europe, parts of Africa, and the Pacific rim, too. Lots to choose from.)

(Via The Map Room; link seen on the NBR Japan Forum.)

Expressing a view of Mifune Toshiro’s world in to the plate, and the food he loved the most, to your satisfactory.

Unfortunately, the class doesn’t extend to the English portion of its website. Hence the translation sales angle. Go for a meal, thank the owner for the culinary experience, and mention that you’d like to help brush up the multilingual site so it matches the stature of the man whose name is being borrowed.

(Via @Nictos.)

This makes its latest overture to the translators among its membership an offensive one. This post gives the gory details, but to summarize, LinkedIn invited translators to participate in a user survey, which kicked off with questions gauging their interest in helping localize the site for other language markets and punched them all in the face with the “how would you like to be compensated?” reply options: a badge to put on your profile, an upgraded account, or just the satisfaction of having helped out. Nothing involving money.

A number of translators immediately filled the “additional comments here” bit at the end of the survey with snide, insulted, and angry comments, to judge from the reactions I saw on Twitter. The fallout for LinkedIn has been a considerable drop in its image in the eyes of translators and booming membership in the “Translators against Crowdsourcing by Commercial Businesses” group hosted right there on the site. (To his credit, LinkedIn representative Nico Posner has been posting in that group’s discussions and trying to explain the company’s move, but the explanations aren’t swaying anyone.)

Why is this? It isn’t as though LinkedIn is the first outfit to try to get a bunch of its content translated for free in this way. The TED Open Translation Project gets the TED conference talks translated and subtitled in a range of languages, all by volunteers. (The site also notes that this project is “generously supported by our sponsor Nokia,” but I guess that generosity doesn’t extend to money for the people doing the work.) Since the TED videos are all released under a Creative Commons license, though, they are free to use, repost, and share with others, so it isn’t as though the TED people are trying to make money off of the labor of the folks producing the translations.

I wrote last May about the way Facebook got its site interface translated into various tongues through the crowdsourcing approach. Here we’re getting closer to the unpleasantness that is a for-profit firm begging for freebies. Two differences, though: First, the Facebook approach used pro translators toward the end of the process, to go over the close-to-final output and make sure it wasn’t still amateurish. (This is admittedly something LinkedIn could be considering.) Second, it fired up a translation application and let any and all comers jump right in and take part, rather than asking experienced translators to do the grunt work without pay. (Which, it should be noted, has not been without problems.)

Which leads me to the biggest mistake that LinkedIn made. The company actually sought out professional translators from among its membership and approached them with this survey. Rather than open the door to college students, who might be interested in the task and have the free time to take it on, or be interested in the potential minor benefit of a “I helped out” badge on their LinkedIn profiles when they try looking for a job through the site one day, the company came to people who can and do charge real money for exactly this sort of job and gave them the survey with no mention of that cold, hard cash. It’s not hard to see why nobody in this group is viewing this as a way to “accelerate their success.”

Anyway. I imagine that LinkedIn will eventually rope some translators-in-training into this job, save money and please the investors, and get localized for a number of new markets. But at the cost of some good will among the language professionals who until this week thought more highly of the site as a place to develop their professional identity online.

Semi-related aside

Chris Salzberg (until March this year one of the authors at Global Voices) gave a presentation in Tokyo recently on social media and translation, in which he pointed out that a group of 240 unpaid Chinese translators translate every article in every issue of the weekly Economist. (Not having attended the talk, I can’t say for sure whether he successfully made the connection between “groups successfully do translation projects on a volunteer basis” and “there is a business model” that his slide seems to suggest.) Chris has an article online at Translation Journal that’s also worth reading if you’re interested in cooperative translation efforts. When you’re talking about purely volunteer work for worthy causes, or unsolicited translations of a magazine that isn’t going to be localized and marketed in a certain country anyway, there are certainly situations where crowdsourced translation plays a valuable role.

Super bonus humor postscript

The About Us page on LinkedIn comes complete with a video whose subtitles you can change to a number of languages, courtesy of whoever produces the things with the tools over at dotSUB. The Japanese subtitles are quite obviously the result of machine translation with minimal human editing, or perhaps a second-year Japanese student with access to Jim Breen’s glossaries. If you read Japanese, by all means check them out; if you can’t, go to a site like Engrish.com and envision the same sort of thing, going the other direction. (I stuck screencaps of the subtitles over here in case you just want the text without the sound and newfangled moving pictures. Clicking the “Video Transcription” bar at the dotSUB page will get you the text data; make sure you select the language you want in the video frame first.)

Good news, for a limited time: Yomiuri has made its ヨミダス歴史館 available to all for the month of April. Search the main Japanese paper or the Daily Yomiuri, narrow your search to noteworthy people or to a certain era. If this was permanently open to the Web-browsing public it would be a formidable database for Japan researchers.

The info you need:
ID: ustemp
Password: m7k77s

(Via the H-Japan list.)

The MacArthur Foundation has extended their deadline for their new Asia Security Initiative Blogger Awards competition until April 12, 2009. Since there are quite a few Forum members who are interested in security issues (and blogging), we are passing along their announcement and information. – Japan Forum staff.

Asia Security Initiative Blogger Awards
The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation
Deadline: April 12, 2009

The Foundation is now seeking applications for its Asia Security Initiative Blogger Awards (the “Awards”) described below. The Foundation seeks, through the use of blogs, to advance the field of International Peace and Security by enhancing the knowledge and understanding of Asian security issues.

A successful applicant will be expected to post three to five blogs per week. At least two blog postings per month shall be 200-400 words in length and focus on a topic of relevance to the Asia Security Initiative. The remaining posts may be shorter in length (10-100 words) and could highlight an interesting article or conference, briefly comment on world events relevant to Asian security, or raise questions for other bloggers.

Up to five (5) individuals may be awarded $10,000 each. The Foundation reserves the right not to make any Awards if no applicants meet the applicable criteria or for any other reason as determined by the Foundation.

The Award Guidelines are available online. Good luck if you apply!