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 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.

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.)

Companies have combined the power of humans and computers to simultaneously double the speed of translation and nearly halve its cost. Where each translator once converted 2,500 words a day at a cost of some 25¢ per word, they can now offer 5,000 words a day at around 12¢-15¢ a word.

Marvelous. This translator makes the same amount of money per day, according to this math, but turns out twice as much text in the target language. Efficiency up, global understanding up. But there are problems here. A few quick, unorganized thoughts:

Problem 1: We aren’t worrying about the fact that this means only half as much time can be spent on proper rereading by the translator and editing by a fresh pair of eyes. The hybrid approach of MT to begin and a human to polish the turds that are MT output means there’s an unhappy person in the mix now—at least I don’t think many people are happy about wrestling with clumsily translated text. I can’t stand it when I’m dealing with stuff a human put together, and even that clumsy human translator is leagues ahead of a machine, and will remain there for the foreseeable future.

Problem 2: The editors who deal with machine output are, ideally, bilingual and capable of doing the translation themselves. If something looks truly odd in your target text, going back to the source text to figure out what’s going on is the only way to set things straight. (Well, there’s actually another way: the monolingual editor just makes a wild guess. I didn’t say it was a good way.) In other words, the ideal form of this man-machine mind meld involves taking a translator who used to be crafting his own sentences and making him clean up the ones a computer spits out at him. Job satisfaction in this new world? Heh.

Problem 3: Don DePalma, chief research officer at a translation outfit, notes that companies need to get their information out there in front of customers in their own languages. “When you’re dealing with anything really expensive or that potentially involves a long-term financial decision—like life insurance or stocks—customers prefer to have information in their own language,” he says. But this is precisely the sort of text that needs to be handled by a specialist, and the companies that sell “really expensive” products will be the very last holdouts still using human pros for the entire process. (It would be fun to see someone trying to market life insurance via Google Translate and an editor in Bangalore, though.) It’s fine to trot this out as proof that companies will need to pay more attention to localizing their material for various markets, but it’s a poor example to bring into the “MT is the future” article.

Problem 4: This.

With [human-assisted machine translation] systems, text is fed into a computer program that tackles the first round of word and sentence conversion using statistics, language rules, or matching with past translations. That covers about 90% of the work. A human then steps in to correct mistakes, clarify sentences, and refine the language for the intended audience or market.

Anyone who’s done translation (at least at a level going beyond churning out crap drafts for rock-bottom prices) or editing knows that the 90% figure here is sheer idiocy. Experienced translators don’t tend to work in phases like this (pump out rubbish at blinding speed and then go back to correct spelling and grammar errors and think about tone and style); they have all these tasks in mind as they go through their text, and it’s hard as a result to define percentages for the effort going into each one of them. But I think the thing that makes translating between human languages a steep challenge for computers is the need to “refine the language for the intended audience or market.” Computers can’t recognize context like that. Humans can, and for human translators, keeping that context in mind and crafting a target text that meets the needs of style, readership, and client preference accounts for vastly more than 10% of their effort. I’d suggest flipping this formula around and saying that the computers handle a tenth of the work, not nine times that amount.

Problem 5: “Language translation is far from being mastered by humans, computers, or any mix of the two.” This is just annoying. It reeks of creationists’ “teach the controversy” demands for equal time for unequal worldviews. Using languages to communicate is what humans do. Birds fly. Fish swim. We talk. What mastery there is in the field of translation belongs entirely to people, and articles like this one need to be written from the perspective of how close computers are to reaching that standard.

Anyway. Enough problems. I’m of two minds when it comes to predicting the future of machine translation. On the one hand, I think the human capacity for language is too deep and too broad for machines to ever take it over completely, and even if 90% of clients end up happy with dirt-cheap mediocrity, the 10% of clients still paying for human quality will represent a healthy chunk of a growing language-services pie. So the good translators will still be making money, and it won’t be by massaging the output of a Google data center.

On the other hand, though, if the scientists ever crack this mystery wide open (perhaps by giving up on computers with nothing but 0s and 1s to deal with and creating new machines that function more like a brain) then we’ll get our translating machine. I’ll be out of a job, along with all my translator and interpreter buddies. But of course we’ll have plenty of company in the unemployment lines, since computers with real thinking power will already have taken over more menial tasks like piloting airplanes, writing software, drafting legislation, teaching children . . .

After spending their years as coordinators for international relations and picking up some translation skills along the way, some soon-to-be JET graduates think about making the move to the language services industry. There are plenty of people out there working as translators, but how did they get that work?

A quick look at the situation might make it seem like a Catch 22: employers are all looking for someone with relevant experience, but you can’t get that without finding an employer to take you on. This might come across particularly in specialized fields like financial or legal translation.

Not all is hopeless, though. There are ways to market yourself more effectively to potential employers, and there are things you can do right now to prepare yourself for the job search when the time comes. The first of these things is fairly obvious:

Get Good

You’ll have an easier time getting a job as a translator if you’re more talented in translation to begin with. There are four tasks you’ll want to pursue during your time as a CIR in this connection:

1. Do jobs. This goes without saying, really. If your CIR assignments involve translation, focus on that work and polish your skills while you produce the texts your employer needs. If you aren’t doing much translation, look around for projects you could propose—a multilingual municipal website, signage for local tourist sites, and so on.
2. Get feedback. This is something that’s not always easy to do, but ideally you want to show your work to native Japanese speakers, who will tell how you’re doing in staying faithful to the source material, and native speakers of your language, who will set you straight when what you write looks like it came from a robot instead of a human author.
3. Network. If you’re involved in an online forum focused on your current job you’re doing this already, to some extent; take part in discussions on translation techniques to focus that networking. (This could be a good way to get the feedback you need, too.) Consider joining groups like JAT or SWET (see the links below), or at least attending their meetings when you can; you don’t need to be a member for that. Go to IJET or an ATA meeting. Industry people you’ve met in person are people who will remember you later when you come looking for a way into the industry.
4. Pay attention. Read plenty of Japanese—to get better at it, but also to get more knowledgeable about what’s being written about. Read plenty in your own language, too. You need to develop an ear for appropriate, persuasive voices in the different fields where you may one day do work of your own.

Get Focused

Most established translators will tell you that the way to success in this business is not to do anything and everything that comes your way, but to specialize in an area you enjoy. (This should also be an area with real demand for translation services. Lots of people like manga, but the population that’s paying real money for translated manga isn’t large enough to support a lot of well-paid translators in that segment. In other words, don’t think of entering a field where your competition is a bunch of college students working for free.)

It can help to think of high-quality, high-paying translation as a donut. In the middle are all those people (I was one) who started off with language skills and not much else: Japanese majors, linguists, aimless bilinguals. On the outside of the donut are all the industries that make up the modern economy. It looks like this:

As the pure linguists develop an interest in some particular field, they learn more about it. The more field-specific knowledge they gain and pair with their language talent, the better they are at translating things related to that field, and the more money they can charge for it. The people on the outside, meanwhile—many high-paid translators fall in this category—begin with a career and experience and gain the language skills as they go on. In the end we all find ourselves in the donut. (Needless to say, we all continue learning on both sides of this equation throughout our careers; nobody starts off with perfect command of two languages, or encyclopedic knowledge of an industry.)

Get a Job

There are freelance and in-house translators, and the former will often claim that they are in the best position: they make more money, they pick their clients, they set their hours. The latter, meanwhile, will point out that they don’t have to do sales, write estimates, bill clients, withhold their own taxes, or pay for their own office space. There are pluses and minuses on both sides.

In the early part of your career, though, the pluses are overwhelmingly on the in-house translation side. It’s possible to start out by marketing your services directly to clients, but it’s far easier to let the company’s sales department do that job, while you focus on becoming a better translator.

The Japan Times carries classified ads on Mondays that usually contain at least a few translation job offers. The paper also has an online ads section, so take a look there, too. The Honyaku, SWET, and JAT mailing lists all see occasional job postings. Lurk on the lists (membership is only required for the last one) and respond to things that interest you.

Joining JAT, as mentioned above, is a way to meet translators; it’s also a way to create your very own member profile on the JAT website. I get a few emails each month asking me to sign up for freelance work or get in touch regarding a project. You can also set up a profile at Honyaku Home, which doesn’t cost a thing.

What about that Catch 22 described earlier? You need experience to get the job to get experience . . . But you can get some of that experience earlier. Freelance work is a way to get your feet wet, and can be done on the side in some cases. (All situations are different, of course; you may want to check with your employer to confirm that this is all right to do.) In addition to the above sites that let you put together an online profile, magazines like 通訳翻訳ジャーナル and websites like スペースアルク contain lots of information on translation agencies. The shotgun approach can work: send your resume to 50 agencies and do the trials that some of them send back. You can apply directly with companies like Simul International, too; see the Simul website for information on doing a trial and registering as a freelancer. Even my employer has an open invitation to people who want to do work for us.

When a company says something like “three years experience required,” it often isn’t a hard requirement. When applying for jobs, don’t forget to add a mental or equivalent to the end of phrases like those, and boldly send your application in just the same. The worst that can happen is a “No thank you” note or phone call, and you won’t have a job with that firm—but that’s exactly where you are right now. Be confident, too. You don’t have years of experience as a full-time translator, but CIR experience shows that you’ve functioned in a Japanese office setting, doing many of the tasks these employers are looking for.

Consider also casting your net a bit wider. You may want a job as a translator, but look at the ads for positions like “in-house editor” and “communications specialist” as well. These are jobs that can involve lots of brushing up other people’s translations, but once you’re on the inside of an organization doing this work you will have a shot at taking it on yourself. And because translation is a writing skill in the target language, producing copy for a company is a good way to get better at all forms of writing, including translation. Even executive secretaries do their fair share of translation work, and can find themselves transferred to divisions doing purer word work later on.

Get Informed

Below are some links to online information that you might find helpful:

Articles About Translation (Language Realm)
A good collection of essays on the language services industry. The “Translation as a Profession” series in particular is worth a look.

Getting Started as a Translator: Gleanings from Honyaku
A collection of posts from Honyaku mailing list threads going back to 1994. Very applicable to the field, even a decade or more later.

Translation as Vocation
A slideshow that accompanied a March 2007 presentation on ways to break into the field of J-E translation.

John Scalzi’s Utterly Useless Writing Advice
Not on translation per se, but it’s a worthwhile read for all people who want to write words for money.

Honyaku
This is a mailing list where translators facing problems in a job ask for help. There’s also occasional discussion of matters peripherally related to dealing with words on pages, so it can be good to lurk and learn. Job offers come down this pipeline from time to time, too.

The Society of Writers, Editors, and Translators
This group holds monthly meetings on topics you may find interesting. The mailing list is free to join for nonmembers; become a member for reduced admission to those meetings and a spot in the SWET directory.

The Japan Association of Translators
This group also holds monthly meetings in Tokyo, as well as other places in Japan and around the world from time to time. The profile you can create here as a member will attract messages from agencies looking to add people to their rosters. JAT organizes the annual IJET conferences (coming up next in Miyazaki in April 2010), which are great to attend. The organization was also crazy enough to elect me director as of May 2009.

“Can you look over this translation to make sure it’s correct?” This is the sort of request you might hear from time to time. What does correctness mean in this case, though? There are many ways to measure how good a translation is—its accuracy, its effectiveness, and even its beauty might be yardsticks to use. But the yardstick you choose depends on context. And context, as we have seen, means more than just words on the page.

Let’s start with this short statement from the website of the Edo-Tokyo Open Air Architectural Museum:

江戸東京たてもの園は、1993年（平成5年）3月28日に開園した野外博物館です。都立小金井公園の中に位置し、敷地面積は約７ヘクタール、園内には江戸時代から昭和初期までの、27棟の復元建造物が建ち並んでいます。当園では、現地保存が不可能な文化的価値の高い歴史的建造物を移築し、復元・保存・展示するとともに、貴重な文化遺産として次代に継承することを目指しています。

This is fairly straightforward information. We’ll begin by putting together a similarly straightforward English version along these lines:

The Edo-Tokyo Open Air Architectural Museum is an outdoor museum that opened on March 28, 1993 (Heisei 5). Located in Tokyo Metropolitan Koganei Park, the museum is about 7 hectares in size; on its grounds are 27 restored buildings dating from the Edo period to the early Showa era. Historical structures with high cultural value that cannot be preserved on their original sites are moved to the museum, where they are restored, preserved, and displayed, with the goal of handing them on to the next generation as a precious cultural heritage.

This translation adheres closely to the original Japanese in the order in which it presents the information. Does this make it the correct translation? . . . Maybe.

What is the purpose of this translation?

If your boss asked you to translate this site because he wanted a quick look at what it says, your job is done at this point. You’ve provided all the relevant information, and your translation is a correct fit for the task at hand.

If, however, your job is to create an English version of the site to inform potential visitors who don’t read Japanese, you need to work on this text some more. You aren’t just laying out information; you’re advertising the museum, and that means making your translation more attractive. Present the place as exciting, educational, and worth a trip to Koganei.

The Edo-Tokyo Open Air Architectural Museum, located in Koganei Park, features 27 restored buildings dating from the Edo period to the early Showa era. These culturally valuable structures were moved to the museum when they could no longer be preserved on their original sites. Here they are carefully restored, displayed, and preserved as a precious cultural heritage to be passed on to future generations.

It’s shorter now, and we’ve lost some information. But that wasn’t likely to motivate people to come see the preserved structures—readers won’t care so much when the place was established, and “Heisei 5” is particularly unhelpful; the full name of the park is similarly unneeded here. It’s no longer an exact match for the Japanese, but for our advertising purposes this might be a correct translation.

What do the readers need?

Above we took out the Heisei year designation. Japanese readers may appreciate that information, but foreign readers aren’t apt to count years according to imperial reigns. We need to consider what our readers will want from the text, and provide them with a translation that serves their needs.

Perhaps the English website will help direct visitors to this place. In that case we’ll need some geographic pointers. Perhaps the visitors would benefit from additional historical background—not everyone knows when the “Edo period” was, for instance. Here we go again:

The Edo-Tokyo Open Air Architectural Museum opened in March 1993 in Koganei Park, north of Musashi Koganei station in western Tokyo. The expansive outdoor museum contains 27 restored buildings dating from the eighteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries. Historical structures from around the Tokyo area that cannot be preserved on their original sites are restored, preserved, and displayed on the museum grounds, with the goal of handing these precious cultural properties on to the next generation.

Note also that not all readers will be familiar with the hectare as a unit of area, and the exact size of this place isn’t vital information in any case. This isn’t a history essay, so we don’t need to give the precise years for the Showa era. A quick look around the website lets us know that the buildings date from the middle of the Edo period to the early postwar era; we use that information here.

What does the client want?

In addition to thinking about the sort of text you’re writing and the needs of your readers, you have to consider what the client wants to see in your translation. Japanese bureaucrats often prefer to see a particular flavor of English writing—a “governmentese” that isn’t necessarily natural, but is a very straight translation with which they are comfortable. (The first draft above might be a good fit for them.)

Maybe this client wants to put together a pamphlet for kids. You’ll be asked to write for younger readers in this case:

The Edo-Tokyo Open Air Architectural Museum was founded in 1993. This large museum in Tokyo’s Koganei Park contains 27 historical buildings. Some of these are very old, dating all the way back to the middle of the Edo period—that was hundreds of years ago! When these important buildings from around Tokyo were about to be torn down, people worked to save them, bringing them all the way to this museum. Here these cultural structures are preserved so people can continue enjoying them today, and into the future.

The sentences are shorter. The vocabulary is simpler. And the text is more energetic, to hold the children’s attention. (We might also note that some of the buildings here inspired Miyazaki Hayao’s art in Spirited Away.) If the client comes to you with a request for a certain kind of language, it’s your job to produce that. Stay flexible!

In its most basic form, translation requires you to include all the information in the original, adding nothing and taking nothing away. But translators are called on to do jobs closer to copywriting much of the time. The examples above show some very different approaches to the same paragraph in Japanese, but depending on the kind of writer you are, the needs of your readers, and the demands of your client, they might all be correct.

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.