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Keeping things cool
A quick post to note that I’ve uploaded more photos to the Flickr set of shots from Hokkaido. I wrote about what’s happening over on the SWET blog, so I’ll just point you that direction instead of reprinting everything here.
One update to that previous post: I haven’t been arrested or interrogated about the bits of electronic detritus in the hotel wastebasket. Apparently someone here could tell the difference between a broken SD card reader and a left-over missile timing device. Lucky me.
More from Hokkaido
I had planned to grab a bunch more photos from my camera and upload them to Flickr, but my SD card reader crapped out last night. So I still have only that first batch up. Here’s one of the delightful Pokemon bus that took us from Chitose Airport to the site a few days ago.
Work has been rough for me and my teammate (we’re working in pairs of a native-English-speaking translator and a Japanese checker/E-J translator). We were in the work room until dawn the first night, when there was a lot of information to get into the system in time for it to go live, and until well past dawn the second night, when there was little to do. Then it was decided that the media site admin room didn’t need to be manned 24 hours a day, so all the teams who were looking at similar schedules for the rest of our time here got a reprieve. There’d better be a bonus of some kind in this for us!
The schedules are friendlier now, at any rate. Today my team is in until around 8:00 in the evening. We have most of tomorrow off, so we might take a walk up on the golf courses and ski runs on the hills behind our hotel and see if we can spot a fox or deer or SDF special forces sniper or something. Photos to follow, if I can track down a card reader! This is the freaking International Media Center, so there must be some sort of support office for photographers that can hook me up.
Toyako time
I’m posting this from the International Media Center in Toyako. All the G8 leaders will be showing up in the next few days to chat about world hunger and the price of oil and where Fukuda Yasuo gets his suits made, and then they’ll fly off to new destinations, or back home.
In the meantime I will be sitting in a small, heavily chilled room full of computers and video editing decks and such, typing translations into the press information system. This is what lets cameramen and writers know when to get onto the bus to go to the interview and photo op. Lots of very hard-working folks from the Foreign Ministry and lots of frogs shrieking in the nearby ponds when we close up shop late in the night after keying in 50 or 60 “UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown to arrive on government plane at 10:00 on Wednesday” type messages. (I made that example up, terrorists, so you can’t plan your assassination based on my help! Besides, there are about 35,000,000 police officers in southern Hokkaido right now. Give it up.)
The photo is of the media working space last night, before the center opened up officially. Shiny clean desks ready to get abused by the crushing weight of a thousand Dell laptops. Read all about it in your paper next week.
More SWET posting &c.
In the “web” category:
A few quick links to things I wrote on that other site:
One, two, three . . . (on Ryan Ginstrom’s online and downloadable word-and-character-counting utilities)
Facebook gets translated, saves a ton of money (on, well, Facebook and the translation of its interface)
Guerrilla editing on the road (on the wild adventures of the members of the Typo Eradication Advancement League)
In the “life” category:
Sakura is an active, active girl. She gets us up anywhere from 4:00 to 6:00 in the morning, and when she is up it’s definitely time for us all to be awake, feeding her and playing with her and reading her books. She loves to spend time outside, which will be a challenge to deal with once the summer heat hits in earnest. Putting shoes on is the sign that it’s time to visit the great outdoors, and shoes are therefore among her favorite things these days.
In the “work” category:
Japan Echo lost in the bidding for a Cabinet Office publication that would have meant an extra 50 pages or so of translation and layout each month. Mixed feelings here: the job would have helped the company’s bottom line, but it would have been a brutal pace at which to write and edit, and bureaucrats in the central government aren’t known for their appreciation of finely crafted phrases. We would have had to take on more help for the project and we wouldn’t have enjoyed much of it. So . . . whew?
In place of that it looks like we’ll be busy in July, at least, doing on-site work at the G8 Hokkaido Toyako Summit. Eight years ago I went to Miyazaki and Okinawa for the G8 foreign ministers’ and leaders’ meetings. Sat in tiny, insufficiently air-conditioned rooms and translated or proofed little blurbs of text to go out on the media info system. The work should be the same this time around, more or less, but a full eight-year cycle in the G8 process brings with it a whole lot of technological advances in the meantime, so I don’t think my dim memories of how to key the press releases in that old system will help much with whatever Hakuhodo sets up this time around. Prep meetings begin next week. We’ll see.
Google Translate on the job
Some time ago I grabbed this link to write about: Google Translate Asks You to “Suggest a Better Translation.” In a nod to the idea that no, computers aren’t really good at this human language thing, the folks at Google have taken the most business-savvy Web 2.0 step possible: make the users improve your product for you! You don’t have to pay actual translators to vet your output, and as a bonus you can serve ads to the eyeballs of everyone involved in the process.
The news this morning featured plenty of amused commentary on the signs Cubs fans were holding up to cheer on Fukudome Kosuke as he almost hit for the cycle. Asiajin has a nice explanation of what happened here: Google Translate tricked Cubs fans thoughtlessly. It turns out that Google’s toy could have used a bit of that user improvement before someone grabbed the Japanese rendering of “It’s gonna happen” there, which was for some reason 偶然だぞ. Telling your team’s guy “you just got lucky that time” isn’t the greatest thing to do when his bat is just about the only thing standing between you and defeat. Which you suffer anyway. Then again it is the Cubs we’re talking about here.
Update: Commenter Adam Rice has written this post about the Google thing, which, as he notes, promises “perhaps a huge jump forward in improvement over older MT systems . . . but perhaps a huge clusterfuck of unharmonized spammy nonsense.”
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