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Mistakes will appered in web.
I don’t know how much money the real estate folks spent on this flashy website for the Island Tower development in Fukuoka. Millions of yen, though, to be sure. The “37–41 Prestige Floor” link on the right shows you a sexy set of video introductions to the luxury units on top of those towers, complete with the following text:
Wellcome? Dedveloping? Not only were these people too stingy to shell out a few thousand yen for a native English speaker to translate these phrases, they were too lazy to turn on a spell checker. Not that it matters much when English letters aren’t anything more than decoration, but it’s still amazing to see this sort of stuff on such a fancy, obviously expensive web production.
The world of (*honyaku*)
More exciting translation-related stuff! Namely, this stuff. A sample:
“T-Cube (tentative name)” is half applied product which made the best use of the result of this T-Engine project. It is possible to use it widely as a computer for a high function and an efficient built-in control in standard T-Engine board besides being able to use it for the usage of a business terminal and IA(Internet Appliance) with “T-Cube (tentative name)” unit by adding LAN function not included and the high resolution graphic function, etc.Moreover, the customer oneself can design hardware for end-products again based on the hardware of “T-Cube (tentative name)” because technological information in the circuit chart etc. is open to the public, and [it] develop with original customer’s variegated (*yubikitas*) equipment. In this case, the development of the software of end-products also precedes on “T-Cube (tentative name)”, can advance, and has merit that the development period of the entire product can be greatly shortened.
These people used a translation software package of some kind and didn’t even bother to go through the output to replace the terms it didn’t have a suggestion for—the stuff marked in (*these*). Note also the inclusion of parenthetical comments inside quotation marks—that’s something you see a lot in government documents, for some reason. (The original text is over here, if you can read Japanese and want to see what’s going on.)
Here’s an article that sheds some light on the companies that willingly pump out inexplicable English instead of paying people (me!) real money for real language.
Chile trip
In November 2004 I went to Santiago to translate a press conference transcript. The APEC summit took place here that year. Chile is the farthest APEC member from Japan, so it doesn’t get any more distant than this. Flying there took about 12 hours to Dallas, a 6-hour layover, and another 9 hours to Santiago. I arrived on the morning of 11/21, translated the press conference held on the evening of 11/22, and flew out on the prime minister’s plane (an Air Self-Defense Force flight) on the morning of 11/23. I’ve uploaded some photos of the whole deal.
The work itself doesn’t take that long to do. I get a copy of the prepared comments beforehand; I usually translate this in advance, even though it’s likely to change considerably, just because it makes it easier when I don’t have to go digging for proper nouns during crunch time later. The advance document comes with seven or eight expected questions and proposed answers for them, and I translate them as well. It’s a way to kill a few hours when I wake up at four in the morning, if nothing else. (Note: In the language services industry people are strict about using “translation” for written work and “interpreting” for oral stuff. I do the former; I’ve been pressed into the latter a few times, but it doesn’t come naturally to me.)
In the end things are over quite quickly. The press conference takes 20 or 30 minutes and we have the complete Japanese and English transcripts within a couple hours after it’s done. These get mailed off to the Japanese Cabinet Office, which posts them on its website. If you’re interested you can see the English version right here. (The Japanese one is up as well, if you’re able to read it.) Thrilling stuff, to be sure.
Santiago was warm, quiet, and pretty. My screwy internal clock and the work schedule kept me from going out on the town at night, so I didn’t get to eat many local delicacies or drink the wine while I was there. I did get a couple bottles to bring back with me, though. My Spanish is nearly nonexistent but I got around all right with the little vocabulary I know. How much is a subway ticket, one sandwich please, that sort of thing. It worked all right.
I flew regular airlines to get there, but the flight back was on the Japanese government plane. There are two planes that fly in a pair, in case one breaks down somewhere. Big Boeings with a conference room up front and a bedroom upstairs. As you go back in the plane the people get less important, down from cabinet secretaries to ministry division heads and then all the way back to steerage, where the press and I hang out. (There are a few pictures of the interior online. I haven’t seen him do a press conference onboard, but I understand he did this on the way back from his trips to Pyongyang; the reporters sat in the plane on the tarmac while he went into town to talk with Kim. I sit at that desk and do work sometimes.) It’s a smoking flight, which is terrible. One of the guys on the security detail went through probably two packs of cigarettes during the 23 hours we were in the air. Ugh. The seats are fairly comfortable—they were business class seats about 20 years ago, which means they aren’t nearly as nice as the seats you see nowadays, but they recline nicely and offer good leg-room. The food is great. Flight crews are elite members of the Japanese ASDF in dress uniform. They smile as they bring you beer, wine, water, snacks, and these weird filters you can put over your nose to help you forget about that dude with the two-pack-a-day habit a couple seats ahead of you. Good times.
This was my second of these trips; I went to New York in late September for the UN General Assembly. Coworkers in my company did trips to Georgia (the US state) for the G8 summit, Hanoi for the ASEM meeting, and Vientiane for the ASEAN + 3 gathering. Sounds like a fun bunch of places to visit, and this job for a time was one way to do it, but what an exhausting way to go . . . It’s an interesting job, though.
Japanese partners
A while ago on the Honyaku list there was this discussion about terms used to describe “partners,” as in “significant others.” Terms tossed around in the thread included 伴侶, 配偶者, パートナー, 彼氏 and 彼女, and so on.
This screencap is from a survey I filled out after buying a MacBook recently. The question is asking who the primary users are for various computers in my household; I’m the guy using the top three, and my wife uses the fourth, a laptop running Windows. (ME. Shudder.) I thought it was interesting to see that the survey makes room for “your lover, or that special someone” in addition to the “spouse, partner” choices.
Computers don’t do this yet
The New York Times has a piece on the interpreting industry that’s worth a look: “Some Words About Interpreting.” It’s refreshing to see an article that isn’t breathlessly relaying the latest press release from some tech company promising a breakthrough in machine translation, and actually talking about the fact that multilingual people are in demand and making money.
It’s also interesting to see the info on the size of the telephone interpreting business. These companies have thousands of workers on the books. The president of one services firm says “his interpreters help police officers and other emergency workers deliver an average of 10 babies a day.” That’s a lot of “Breathe! Breathe!” in different tongues.
There was also a bit that I found interesting as a teacher of translation to students who pay quite a bit of money for their classes:
[Language Learning Enterprise founder Kathleen Diamond] seemed to be coasting in early adulthood along a predictable middle-class path, marrying, having two children and holding down intermittent teaching jobs.
Then, the proverbial light bulb went off. In 1979, Berlitz offered her $4.25 an hour to teach French to students who were paying $25 each for the lesson. Assuming a class of 10 students, well, you do the math.
“It was that huge gap that set off something in me,” she said.
I’m making considerably more than $4.25 an hour there, but it’s something to keep in mind for the future.
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