“There are also 130 people in Japan with the last name 舌!” This is really fascinating. Are they all in a particular region of Japan? Do you think they are all related? Did they just choose that name at the beginning of Meiji Era when people were required to have a family name? If so, what a sense of humor they had.
Hi Bob, I know this comment has nothing to do with your post, however I saw a comment of yours from 2016 on a blog post talking about non-native translators. While I definitely agree that as a general rule you should stick to translating into your native language, don't you believe there are exceptions to the rule? Personally, I strongly believe there are some.
I tweeted at you too but I am guessing you did not get any notifications. Anyways I am looking forward to reading your response to this. Thanks very much.
Hi. I think the issue will soon be moot if it's not already. In the context of human translation, no one is going to be struck down by lightning if they translate into a language in which they are not native. There are certainly situations where that can make sense from economic or resourcing perspectives, hopefully paired with a solid edit by a native speaker. This process, which back in the day some Japanese companies I worked for called "native check", can be done either by people with some level of Japanese langage, who are able to refer to the original while editing; or by completely clueless gaijiin who know no Japanese and imagine that their superior "editing" skills" will allow them to fix up broken English translation when they don't have any way of actually knowing what it is supposed to say.
I guess one aspect of the whole non-native program I have a problem with, as I mentioned in that old comment, is the presumption that Japanese is just so amazingly special and complicated that no gaijin can ever fully comprehend it, a view that might uncharitably be viewed as almost racist. One company I worked for applied this point of view and came up with a weird process where a native English speaker would do the J-E translation and then a native Japanese speaker would "edit" it; in many cases, "mangle" would have been a better word. I still remember the company coming back to me with customer complaints about "bad translations" which were actually a result of shoddy editing.
There is also an assumption I've encountered that any Japanese person can understand any Japanese document. But in fact a lot of the translation I have done is highly is highly specialized econometrics, for example--and could *not* really be "understood" or translated well by someone without domain expertise.
Full disclosure: in my checkered past, I have actually translated from English to Japanese. And my Japanese is OK but by no means native-speaker level. However, these were computer manuals where I knew *exactly* what they were saying, and in addition, the translations got a solid editing pass by a Japanese speaker, referring to the original, fixing up all my broken te-ni-wo-ha.
I don't think it's a coincidence that as far as I can tell this whole process involving people native in the source language translating into a non-native target language is much more prevalent when it comes to Japanese than compared to say European languages.
Thanks for reading my blog. Any suggestions for good topics?
“There are also 130 people in Japan with the last name 舌!” This is really fascinating. Are they all in a particular region of Japan? Do you think they are all related? Did they just choose that name at the beginning of Meiji Era when people were required to have a family name? If so, what a sense of humor they had.
Hi Bob, I know this comment has nothing to do with your post, however I saw a comment of yours from 2016 on a blog post talking about non-native translators. While I definitely agree that as a general rule you should stick to translating into your native language, don't you believe there are exceptions to the rule? Personally, I strongly believe there are some.
I tweeted at you too but I am guessing you did not get any notifications. Anyways I am looking forward to reading your response to this. Thanks very much.
Hi. I think the issue will soon be moot if it's not already. In the context of human translation, no one is going to be struck down by lightning if they translate into a language in which they are not native. There are certainly situations where that can make sense from economic or resourcing perspectives, hopefully paired with a solid edit by a native speaker. This process, which back in the day some Japanese companies I worked for called "native check", can be done either by people with some level of Japanese langage, who are able to refer to the original while editing; or by completely clueless gaijiin who know no Japanese and imagine that their superior "editing" skills" will allow them to fix up broken English translation when they don't have any way of actually knowing what it is supposed to say.
I guess one aspect of the whole non-native program I have a problem with, as I mentioned in that old comment, is the presumption that Japanese is just so amazingly special and complicated that no gaijin can ever fully comprehend it, a view that might uncharitably be viewed as almost racist. One company I worked for applied this point of view and came up with a weird process where a native English speaker would do the J-E translation and then a native Japanese speaker would "edit" it; in many cases, "mangle" would have been a better word. I still remember the company coming back to me with customer complaints about "bad translations" which were actually a result of shoddy editing.
There is also an assumption I've encountered that any Japanese person can understand any Japanese document. But in fact a lot of the translation I have done is highly is highly specialized econometrics, for example--and could *not* really be "understood" or translated well by someone without domain expertise.
Full disclosure: in my checkered past, I have actually translated from English to Japanese. And my Japanese is OK but by no means native-speaker level. However, these were computer manuals where I knew *exactly* what they were saying, and in addition, the translations got a solid editing pass by a Japanese speaker, referring to the original, fixing up all my broken te-ni-wo-ha.
I don't think it's a coincidence that as far as I can tell this whole process involving people native in the source language translating into a non-native target language is much more prevalent when it comes to Japanese than compared to say European languages.
Thanks for reading my blog. Any suggestions for good topics?
Hi Bob, thanks for finally getting back to me. I really appreciate your open-minded response and agree with a lot of what you said there. Take care.