Webster comes to Japan: the City Connection

I ran across a rather odd but interesting tidbit the other day - do you remember that show Webster with Emmanuel Lewis (the perpetual kid) from back in the 80's? No? Well if you're too young for that then first off thanks for making me feel old, but not to fret. That's what South Park is for! He's at the end as the spokesman for Webster's Dictionary. South Park, bridging generational gaps for 13 years and going (ok, maybe not quite).

So anyway, what does Emmanuel Lewis have to do with Japan? Well, I just found out that he, like many a celebrity from the 80's, made a commercial in Japan in 1981 for Clarion stereo equipment. What's even weirder (cooler??) is that he sang the song for the commercial, which went on to peak at #2 on the Japanese Orikon music charts! How's that for bizarre? At the time in Japan, he was known either as Emmanuel-kun or エマニエル坊や (坊や = little kid).

The name of the song was City Connection, and it goes a little something like this:

Ring ring, 電話が ringing tonight
(ring ring, the phone's ringing tonight)
Dance dance, あの娘（こ）と dancing tonight
(dance dance, dancing with that girl tonight)
City connection, love telephone
Whatcha gonna do, whatcha gonna do, whatcha gonna do!

Baby baby baby baby 命掛け (baby baby, my life's on the line)
Papa, mama 僕らを止めないで (papa, mama, please don't stop us)
あの娘（こ）が死ぬほど好きなんだ (I love her more than anything)
今夜は君を離さない (I won't let go of you tonight)



Warning: this song is catchy and may get stuck in your head to the point where you find yourself inadvertently bobbing your head to it hours afterwards! And here's the commercial:

Whales, dolphins.... and tuna!?

Hi there, me again. So I don't really keep up with South Park all that much anymore, but every now and then I watch when they cover an issue that I enjoy - something about hearing them ridicule both sides of the argument and show that everyone is if not full of shit, at least partially containing shit, or shit-like, substance in some capacity. This week's episode was more of the same, covering Sea Shepherd and 98% of the world's lack to comprehend why Japan wants to hunt whales and dolphins. Yes that's right, there's also dolphin hunting, but from my understanding it's mostly only in a small village called Taiji in Wakayama-ken in a festival that's been going on for quite a while.... and Sea World (watch the new South Park episode here).


Now I'm not going to bother giving my entire opinion on the whole whale hunting thing again, but let's just say that I've had whale meat before and feel that as long as their numbers are kept sustainable, hunt away. I will say that to me this is a different issue than with dolphin hunting, as dolphins are in no way anywhere near being extinct or endangered, so the issue is more one of intelligence and, well let's be honest, cuteness. I'm sure there have been studies to back this up somewhere, but beautiful people have a marked advantage in life, and the dolphin case to me is an extension of this into the animal world. Pigs are really intelligent creatures, and yet we keep dumb chihuahuas as pets and stick them in stupid Hollywood movies while we have 101 tasty ways to get a pig onto your plate and in your belly.


Ok, so now I've given you the background on the whales and dolphins - where does the tuna come in, you say? Well look no further than today's headlines to find that an organization in Europe is in agreement with significant reductions in fishing of the Atlantic bluefin tuna, of which stocks are said to be as low as 15% of their original numbers. This is in response to the EU talks of enacting a ban on tuna fishing within its waters to keep the species going. There was also a ban on fishing of certain other species of tuna in the Atlantic for 2 months of last year. As you may or may not know, Japan is the world's largest consumer of tuna, which is a popular staple for sashimi and sushi. Sushi has gained in popularity worldwide in recent years, but that's nothing... do you know how much tuna Japan consumes? Really? They fish more than 300,000 metric tons every year, and yet still have the rest of the world bringing their tuna to Tsukiji market to sell more of top of that. That's 300,000 METRIC TONS, which means that if you had 30,000 dump trucks that could carry 10 tons of tuna each... then no one else would be able to drive anywhere because that's a lot of frickin' tuna.

So, now to bring this all together. Here we have Japan, which has shown that they really like eating fish and other bounties of the sea, even more than they care about what the rest of the world thinks of their eating habits. On the other hand we have a species of fish that is thought to be all too common wind up being endangered because one country eats 1,000 international space stations worth of it on an annual basis. Will Japan be willing to curtail its hunting to let numbers get back into a sustainable figure, and what will this mean for sushi lovers worldwide? Who will think of the tuna!?

Well the answer is that Japan has already agreed to cut back its tuna fishing for a whole 2 months over a 2 year period, so I'm guessing this is one fish they're willing to play ball on. This latest news may mean even more cuts than the measly 5% cutback the Japanese fishers have agreed to thus far. They agreed that tuna is yummy, and thus it would be ashamed to deprive the world of it for a lifetime by stuffing our faces with it now. Looking at the way things are going though, I'm guessing you're going to see less tuna now, and possibly even higher prices for a while if things get too bad. So you heard it here- be responsible next time you do sushi, order the anago.

New Joyo Kanji!!

凄い！

Yesss... every Japanese language nerd's dream come true- more kanji!! Well technically speaking, actually, none of them are new. Rather they are mostly quite common, which is entirely the point. But hey, I guess first I should stop talking (typing?) to myself and let you guys in on what I'm rambling about, right?

So word on the street is that next year they're talking about adjusting the daily use kanji list to 2,131 characters. 5 characters (銑 (SEN, pig iron), 錘 (tsumu, spindle), 匁 (monme, a unit of weight), 勺 (shaku, a unit of capacity), and 脹 (CHOU, swell)) are up for removal, and another 191 are slated to be included. Of those being removed, I would really only consider one (腫, as commonly seen in 腫れる, to become swollen) all that useful.

This would be the first update to the list in almost 30 years, and to be honest I think it's about time. Due largely to the advent of computers and cell phones, it is so much easier to use kanji now - no one knows how to write them, but you don't have to to be able to type them in. (You think people can actually write 鬱病?)

So what's new? Well a lot of stuff is used in place names. Believe it or not, there are quite a few characters that are currently not "general use" that are used in the names of a few cities, prefectures and *ahem* close by countries: 熊 from 熊本 [Kumamoto], 奈 from 神奈川 [Kanagawa] and 奈良 [Nara], 茨 from 茨城 [Ibaragi], 栃 from 栃木 [Tochigi], 阜 from 岐阜 [Gifu], 阪 from 大阪 [Osaka]... even 韓 from 韓国 [Korea]!! These were all on a separate "name characters" list up until now, but I mean seriously? I think Osaka was in my vocab lists 1st semester, Japanese 101. Oh and the word for vocab (語彙)? Until now that didn't make the list as well.

Besides that, some of the stuff on the list are total gimmes - I cannot believe that the words for chopsticks, bath, pillow, rainbow a slew of food words and most of all 俺 (おれ、masculine 'I') is currently not considered "general use".

To be fair, "general use" is really just a guideline though and doesn't necessarily dictate the limits of most people's knowledge. You're supposed to know this list and the name list by the time you graduate high school here, but most kids would already know all the characters on this expansion list as well. Going through them myself I recognized about 2/3rds of them. You can check the list out yourself over at kanjiclinic.com if you want, by the way.

So that being said, I guess the big difference is that a lot of the words that up until now you would see in broken combinations in newspapers will finally be able to be printed properly (完ぺき→完璧, うつ病→鬱病, あいまい→曖昧, etc.). This actually brings up what to me I see as a rather interesting side note - newspapers are written such that anyone with a high school education can read them, and this does not only go for Japan. From what I've heard, actually, US newspapers are written more at like a 9th/10th grade level, if that... not even graduating high school!

More kanji I say, more! It's not going to hurt anything, and hopefully this means these will make their way into a newly revamped JLPT for me to have something to brush up on when I finally get around to taking level 1 again.

Oh and finally a note - the word at the top of this post got snubbed from the list, despite the fact that it is used daily by mixi and keitai users nationwide.

Dispelling common Japanese misconceptions about translation: advice for the aspiring

So the other day I got a mail from a friend I used to work with saying that another friend of hers was looking into how to get started in translation. As she knew that I've recently done the same, she figured maybe I could help give him some friendly advice, and set up a meeting. I have been translating at every job I've had since I got to Japan about 3 years ago now and been accepting freelance work on the side for more than 2 years, but I'm really just getting started at doing freelance work fulltime, so I wasn't sure how much advice I'd be able to offer him. I figured that some experience is better than none though, and as he was just starting out my advice couldn't hurt really.

There are a few things that I feel Japan usually misunderstands about the world of translation, so I stuck to the basics. Here's what I told him:

1. Lots of people think that if you can understand both languages you can automatically be a translator - false. Translation involves 2 main skills: understanding the source text and skillfully putting that into words in the target language. For example, for me this means that I not only have to be able to understand what is written in Japanese, but also need to be able to write well in English. There are plenty of people that aren't very adept at writing in their own language, and if you're one of those people then you're going to need to work at that to be a good translator. It's not just about accuracy (although that is important, it can be pedantically overemphasized amongst Japanese translators), but also about style.
   
   
2. Just because you know both languages doesn't mean you should translate both ways. Uggh... this is probably the most common and annoying misconception in Japan, even with translation companies. In the rest of the world, people generally translate into their native language, basically because no matter how well you learn your 2nd (3rd, 4th, etc.) language, you will always have tiny imperfections or not know all the colloquialisms of the foreign language. In Japan, many people think of a translator as someone who translates between both languages in their pair, and then add an extra step by having a native speaker check the work. I don't care how good Kenji's English is I guarantee that mine is better, and likewise he's always going to know more Japanese than I. From a quality standpoint, whenever possible I should leave translations into Japanese to them, and they should leave translations into English to me.
   
   
3. Work in-house for at least a year or so, and get yourself a specialty. While not strictly required, both of these help for sure. Working in-house means that you often have direct access to the person who wrote the text in the first place and can confirm hard to understand clauses directly. It also means that you have time to build your skills and specialized vocabulary.
   
   As far as a specialty goes, you will make far more money in the long run translating a niche market than you will in general translation. Law work, including patents, and medical work can easily command twice the price of general translation work, but even technical fields such as IT or engineering can make money. I forget where, but one place I saw online said that in the long run it's most important to pick your specialty based on what you enjoy as opposed to what the most expensive field du jour is.
   
   
4. Decide rates based on the source, not the translation! The reason for this is simple and logical, and looking around at some translation companies I can't believe this escapes them... if I'm translating from Japanese to English, I have control over how many words I write, but I can't do anything about how many characters are in the original source text. Thus to take any question of the translator just being wordy in order to inflate their fee and focus on making the best possible translation they can, you should base payment on the source. It's the most fair way to do things.
   
   
5. A word-for-word translation is not always the best translation. As mentioned in 1 above, you are writing for an audience, and different audiences understand things differently. If you have a warning label in Japanese that says "please do this," it should be in command form in English, not left as a kind request. Also there are entirely too many direct translations out there that come off as very stiff and hard to read.
   
   
6. Keep up your skills and never stop learning. In order to do this, you need to read regularly in both languages and also write in your native language, e.g. the target language you're translating into. Many people realize they need to continuously work on their 2nd language, but neglect to work on their native language skills as well. These skills will totally fall off if you don't use them!
   

Those are the basics I believe. Specific rates and all are whole different can of worms... maybe I'll get into it some other time.

Manga for adults?

So the other day I was in a rather typical situation - getting my haircut and making small talk with the barber. The place I go to get my hair cut is actually pretty interesting - they measure my hair on different points of my head with a ruler after cutting it and put it all on this spiffy diagram to save for the next time I came in, so after a few times they know exactly to a science how to cut your hair. Not only that, but everyone in the whole store knew me and my girlfriend by name after the first time going there... and to top it all off they give this awesome scalp massage. Spectacular service!

Anyway, my barber seems like at least a halfway intelligent guy and is pretty cool, and the last time I went in the conversation somehow got onto tv. I find Japanese tv to be barely tolerable in most situations and spend my time in front of a computer to avoid it - I'll spare you the reasoning, but if you're interested then reading this might give you an idea why - so I tried to change the topic by asking him what he's read lately.

Read? Nope, not him. Or at least, not books. He apparently devotes all his reading energies into either manga or magazines. I've personally never been able to get into manga, but I know that a decent portion of the Japanese population, including adults, spends a fair amount of their social reading energies with it.

If I were to pick up the latest issue of X-men or whatever at my age back home then I'd be labeled a nerd before I got the front page open, but I'm not even sure if it's possible to ride the train home from downtown Tokyo without seeing at least one 30 or 40-something salaryman flipping through this week's issue of whatever manga. I can see ulterior motives sometimes though as some of these are interspersed with pictures of J-girl nekkidness... I'm talking about pictures of actual girls here, but you will also find plenty of adult-content manga out there with nudity as well, which just boggles my mind.

There are all sorts and kinds of manga out there on any topic - from your standard Naruto and Fullmetal Alchemist to the more obscure, like the Kuroudo title I mentioned the other day to manga versions of famous books like Vagabond (based on the classic novel Musashi, written in the 1930's and translated in 1981 if you want to look for a copy) and even on historical events. Predominantly it's targeted towards boys/men, but there are also female-oriented manga out there as well.

It is probably because of this range that many people flock to manga as a lighter, more enjoyable alternative to books, but I'm still not sold. There are certain titles out there that I'm sure I'd enjoy (Vagabond and Kuroudo are probably both interesting), but I'd just rather stick with books... how much of it is just a personal prejudice I'm not sure, but books just feel more sophisticated. To me, reading manga for something would be akin to opting to wait for the movie to come out back home, and with some exceptions I'd say that in my experience the original format is far and away better when it comes out in book first (or movie for that matter).

Sure it's probably easier to get through the manga, but maybe that's another reason I like the books... if I'm going to pick up language from reading, I'd prefer it to be as sophisticated as
possible. Also as a translator, it's important to stay read up in both languages to keep my skills from dwindling. You get plenty of people who come out to Japan and lose their high-level communication abilities in English due to lack of native-level input, but then trying to avoid talking over everyone's head will do that to you... I'd like to keep that from happening, in both languages.

Also I don't want to make it seem like everyone out here only reads manga - I'd say books on the train probably still outnumber manga... there's also a fair bit of PSPs and DSes out there, as well as the girls that will sit there and just mess with their phones the entire time they're on the train.

So bottom line, does reading manga instead of books make my barber a simple person? Nah, I think it just makes him more Japanese. I think I can deal with that.

Got published again...

Ok now this announcement is a little late for sure, but as it's somewhat interesting (to me, at least) I figured I'd put it out there. Besides, normally I'm doing confidential stuff which I'm not allowed to talk about, so this is fun for me. :P

As I've been paying the bills as a translator lately, I've been seeing a whole bunch more stuff and reading a bunch more lately. Most of the time I'm working with technical stuff like manuals and work specificiations and such, but I also get some general translation coming through which can be fun.

For example, the other day I was asked to translate one line for a manga called 蔵人(kuroudo) ... here's a review from Amazon:

舞台は島根県。

そこにある日本酒を作っている蔵に外国人が訪れます。
彼の祖母は、外国に渡った日本人で、昔、日本で日本酒を造っていた父親の蔵を想いながら孫である彼に伝えます。

近年、日本酒離れが多い日本で、外国人が日本酒の作りに参加するという観点は
「夏子の酒」を書いた原作者ならではの作品だと思います。

無くなってしまった、自分の蔵を巡る修行の日々。日本語もわからない異文化の中
どうやって酒作りにクロードが携わっていくのか楽しみな一巻です。

The stage is Shimane-ken.

A foreigner visits a sake brewery. His grandmother was a Japanese who left for abroad and told her grandson how her father used to make sake while reminiscing about his brewery.

In a modern Japan which has largely broken away from sake, making a manga about foreigners taking part in sake brewing is something that could only be done by the author of "Natsuko's Sake".

The days of training through making the rounds of his own brewery that is no more... this book tells the interesting tale that our hero Claude has taken on, to learn how to make sake in a different culture without understanding Japanese.

While I argue with the premise that he's the first to come up with the idea of a foreigner brewing sake, it does sound somewhat interesting if the author does it right.

Anyway, so I found out the other day that the book that I translated the line for got published, woo! You can see my work in the June 5th edition of Big Comic Original published by Shogakukan. If you're in Japan then check it out next time you're in a conbini or something.

What does the JLPT mean really?

Given recent circumstances which I won't get into here, I've been getting back to the basics, studying the 'ol Nihongoes. I feel like I've hit one of those linguistic plateaus over the past year or so and am thinking it might be about time to finally polish a certain spur that's sticking out in terms of the JLPT.

As many reading this know, the JLPT currently has 4 levels with 1 being the highest, although they are scheduled to redo the format on next year's test to have 5 levels (the jump from level 3 to 2 was too big for most people) and allow the highest level to measure higher levels of ability better. Up until last year it was only offered once a year (it's now twice a year for the top 2 levels), and worldwide only about a third of those who take the top level pass.

I last took the highest level of it (1Q) 2 years ago, which you currently need a 70% to pass. I got a 278/400, which is roughly 69.5%. Ouch. Given practical knowledge I've gained since then, I should have no problem with it and was planning on taking it again eventually, but was originally thinking that if they're going to change the format I might as well wait for that in 2010... now I'm thinking it might be useful to take it or some other test this year.

So why take the test, and why have I been putting it off? First off a little background - JLPT 1Q is a minimum requirement for entrance into undergrad programs at many Japanese universities, who basically think you need this level in order to be able to understand what's going on in your classes and participate. It is also looked upon favorably by the JET Program, who sees 2Q as the minimum Japanese ability for a CIR from western countries and 1Q as the minimum requirement for a Chinese CIR. Outside of this sphere you may get some recognition out of having it, say in translation circles, but for the most part Japanese people have never heard of it much less people anywhere else in the world. I've heard 1Q thrown around among translators as a bare minimum to get into the field, but the truth is that if they think you can do the job and you pass their trials then 1Q doesn't mean anything. So basically, this means that actually holding a JLPT certification is useful if you want to go to a Japanese school for 4 years or be a CIR - I have a degree already, and I've been a CIR.

The reason to take a test for me is really more about setting a personal goal. Living in the country and doing certain things in the language do raise your levels to a certain extent, but once you can do all the things you need to do comfortably you're learning will start to plateau off which is where I am. The only way to get off this plateau is to set a goal and stick to it, and studying for a test is a great way to force your hand. Sure it's something to put on your resume I guess, but since most people don't know what it is and will probably judge you more on your production ability anyway, I rule that one out.

So what about the reasons NOT to take the JLPT? Well there are a few I can think of, not least of which is the lack of practicality mentioned above. Another is the contrivance of it all - the two main deficiencies I see with the test are 1) it only tests passive knowledge, so no writing or speaking and 2) it's geared towards literary language in the higher levels and thus involves a bunch of stuff not normally needed in daily life, unless you read a lot of higher level stuff daily. 1) means that you can theoretically pass 1Q and not be able to write any kanji or hold a good conversation, which to me defeats the purpose of learning the language. 2) means that you pretty much have to study specifically for the test, again making it less practical to daily life.

There are also other testing options out there depending on where you are in the world and what you want to focus on, such as the Kanji Kentei for kanji nerds (only offered in Japan), BJT for those in the business world (formerly offered by JETRO and includes an interview test if you get far enough), and the little known nihongo kentei(offered to Japanese as well as foreigners) and J-Test(apparently geared towards Chinese), both of which go beyond JLPT levels.

Now given all this, is the JLPT for you? Think long and hard.