The Very First IJET

It’s now just four months before IJET-30 in Cairns kicks off!

We owe an immense debt of gratitude to the 1989/90 JAT Board and band of volunteers for their foresight in organizing the First International Japanese-English Translation Conference, held in Hakone, Japan, on the weekend of May 26-27, 1990. IJET has since grown to become JAT’s flagship annual event, attracting hundreds of participants to the Japan-based conferences and excellent numbers to those held in other countries.

This week, From the Archives has unearthed the Proceedings from IJET-1 for your enjoyment. Whether you’re interested in poetry translation, the business aspects of Japanese language services, the challenges of translation, launching a career in financial translation, machine translation (the state of the art in 1989), common stylistic features of Japanese writing (phaticisms, repetitiveness, verbosity, etc.), patterns of thought and language in Japanese versus those in English, the fascinating backstory to the translation of Mori and Ishihara’s “The Japan that Can Say ‘No’”, or the issue of quality in translation, there’s something for you here.

Here’s the Table of Contents to whet your appetite. Click on the links below to jump to the IJET-1 web page or go directly to the Proceedings (don’t forget, you’ll need to be logged in).

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On Translating Japanese Poetry and Poetic Prose / Chris Drake

Value-added Translation and the Language Services Business / Bruce Holcombe

翻訳の限界 / 板垣新平

Getting Started in Financial Translation / Dan Kanagy

The National Research Council's December 1989 Symposium on Japanese-English Machine Translation / J. Marshall Unger

Some Characteristics of Japanese Style and the Implications for Japanese/English Translation / Judy Wakabayashi

Patterns of Thought, Patterns of Language / Robert Wargo

A Translation that Became a Media Event / Karol Zipple

Panel Discussion / 早良哲夫、原田毅、浅沼健治

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IJET-1 web page: https://ijet.jat.org/past-ijets/conference/ijet-1

IJET-1 Proceedings: https://ijet.jat.org/download/F5XibWb0Og7PtMGx