Finding My Way Through Game Translation: Karma, Rules, and Irony
by Jason Franzman
Good Karma Strikes (for Once)
My initiation into game translation was a bit of luck, perhaps accompanied by some good karma. In the early 90's, I helped a friend get a position at the translation company in Japan where I was working. I left a couple of years later to pursue my freelance translation career, and...
A Look at the Business Side
by Fred Uleman
I have a very simple, yet very important, reminder for you: We very often say we are in the translation business. And we spend great amounts of time honing our translation skills. These skills are important. But just as important is the other half of the “translation business.” It is a business, and we should not lose sight of that side either.
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Meaning-based Translation and the Search for Equivalent Impact
James L. Davis
Two key questions for translators are: “What is the writer of the source text saying?” and “What would a native speaker of the target language say in this situation?” To answer the first question, translators need at least a near-native grasp of the source language grammar and patterns of usage, as well as a clear...
Dear JATPHARMAcists and other JAT members:
JATPHARMA proudly announces the release of the updated and expanded version of the JAT Pharma Handbook bilingual glossary, which JATPHARMA initially released with the JAT Pharma Handbook in 2011.
The glossary represents the first of hopefully many glossaries to be released under the JATPHARMA Terminology Project, which is headed by John Stroman. The...
Loyalty or Betrayal?
Ginny Tapley Takemori
Whenever the issue of being “faithful” to the original comes up in discussions on literary translation, I only have to think of the case of Izumi Kyoka to be reminded of the impossibility of this proposition. My experience of translating his story “Kaiiki“ (“Sea Daemons“) convinced me of the futility of trying to replicate the original and of the...
Making Translation Rewarding
Joji Matsuo
Translation is a rewarding profession. It pays the bills. It also provides ample opportunity for studying about everything from technology to trivia, from marketing tactics to manufacturing techniques, from contemporary art to historic events. You name it, we translate it. And to translate it, we have to study it. No other profession is as diverse. And...
A Proposal for the Creation of a New Translation Theory between Japanese and English by a Partial and Selective Union between Conventional Translation Theory and so-called Technical English Writing
Paper presented at the FIT Fourth Asian Translators' Forum
at Tsinghua University on October 28 – 30, 2004
by Chuichi Kamei (亀井忠一)
In the realm of business, scientific and technical...
A New Billing System
Edward Lipsett
Intercom, Ltd. is located in Fukuoka, handling work between (mostly) the four languages of English, Japanese, Korean, and Chinese. About half of our business comes from Kyushu and the remainder from clients in the Kanto region. In addition to translation, we also do large amounts of design, layout, and outsourced printing.
Since Intercom began as me...
Translating and interpreting in the field of classical music
Introduction
Translators who work in the more “conventional” fields of software, business, patents or whatever, may or may not be aware of the surprising amount of work that exists out there in the rather more obscure field of classical music.
Most of it is in the form of program notes for CDs, as a huge amount of classical music...
On Translating Someone Else's (Emotional) Landscape
I grew up reading all sorts of books that had been translated into Japanese without really thinking what they would be like in their original languages. When I started to learn English in middle school, I was excited to discover “another means” by which to express my thoughts. Having declared at the tender age of 11 that I would be a novelist...
Concerning the May 27th TAC Seminar, How to Use Japanese Punctuation Marks: Understanding the "Totens of Thoughts" from Honda Dokuhon, the speaker made a blog post to tell us his appreciations and more thoughts;
http://1311racco.blog75.fc2.com/blog-entry-3413.html
Greetings!
I’m writing to tell you what the Japan Association of Translators has accomplished over the past 12 months as we approach the end of JAT’s and Japan’s fiscal year on March 31, 2017.
JAT membership hovers at about 800. Half of JAT’s members live in Japan, and the rest are scattered across the globe. You can find most members in the JAT directory at https://jat.org/translators and...