Updated 1997-05-01
JAT Bulletin 145 April 1997
Contents
MARCH JAT BOARD REPORT (Bill Lise)
STANDING AND OPERATING IJET COMMITTEES ESTABLISHED (Bill
Lise)
REPORT OF THE JAT ELECTION COMMITTEE FOR 1997-98 (JAT
election committee)
MEMBERSHIP INFO UPDATE (Jeremy Whipple)
BULLETIN DEADLINE (Emily Shibata-Sato)
MARCH JAT BOARD REPORT
The JAT directors met on March 15th and this report covers
decisions made at that meeting and thereafter.
Bob Oliver gave a treasurer's report, from which it appears
that our online payment system is up and running. We have
already received notices of online payment of dues, and
interestingly enough at least one person has already paid dues
from Japan using this new method, thereby saving a trip to the
bank.
John Burton reports that our membership is back into a growth
mode.
John reported the election results; all director candidates
were elected (see report elsewhere). A postcard notification of
the election results will be (and was) sent out by Jeremy
Whipple.
Turning to the issue of postcard notifications, which JAT
decided to send to all members through September this year, it
was decided to send this notification to members so as to
arrive about one week before the monthly meeting, in the hope
that the meeting announcement would be effective in getting
people to attend.
Emily reported no articles for the April bulletin to
date.
The November (and now December) Bulletins should be uploadable
to the JAT website (http://www.jat.org) after a bit of fine
tuning of the HTML files. Michael will be doing this, which
should mark the start of an online store of past Bulletins,
posted 3 months after their distribution to JAT members, as the
directors decided to do several months ago.
With regard to the JAT website, Evan Geisinger (evan@gol.com)
will join the JAT website committee.
It was decided to hold a meeting on 26 March to establish a
standing (and operating) IJET committee. That was done, the
resulting being reported briefly elsewhere. The operating
IJET-9 committee will hold its first meeting on 24 April.
JAT will be placing two ads in the Sheffield IJET program, one
for JAT, and one for IJET. Bill Lise has obtained positive
films of photos to be used in the latter and will prepare
drafts of the ads (in progress as of this writing).
In addition to the ad placed in the Sheffield program, a call
for papers handout might be prepared by Bill Lise.
Bill Lise
President
* * * * * *
STANDING AND OPERATING IJET COMMITTEES ESTABLISHED
On March 26, JAT held a meeting for people interested in
participating in the organization of future IJET Conferences,
starting with IJET-9, to be held in Yokohama on May 23-24 next
year. That meeting was a moderate success, and resulted in the
signing onto the committee of the people who are destined to
make IJET-9 happen. Two committees, one a subset of the other,
were formed.
As of this writing, the makeups of the committees are as
follows.
Standing IJET Committee:
Jeremy Whipple jwhipple@gol.com
*Yukihiro Sato hanami@mx2.nisiq.net
*Kathleen Taji ktaji@gol.com
Tracy Furuichi tmf@gol.com
Fred Uleman fmu@gol.com
*William Lise billlise@gol.com
Evan Geisinger evan@gol.com
Michinobu Yoshimi yoshmi@tcp-ip.or.jp
*Bob Oliver roliver@gol.com
Adam Rice adamrice@crossroads.net
**George Tokikuni PFG01116@niftyserve.or.jp
In the above, ** indicates the committee chair, and *
indicates operating committee members who will take care of the
actual organization and running of IJET-9.
Bill Lise
President
* * * * *
REPORT OF THE JAT ELECTION COMMITTEE FOR 1997-98
Total ballots received 61 (40% of
membership)
Invalid ballots
Unsigned 1
Late 2
Valid ballots 58
Minimum votes required for election (5%) = 4
Votes obtained
House, Michael 13
Lise, Bill 43
Oliver, Bob 45
Rice, Adam 38
Shibata-Sato, Emily 52
Tokikuni, George 45
Whipple, Jeremy 44
Accordingly, all the above candidates are declared
elected.
The committee would like to thank those members who are
sufficiently interested in JAT to exercise their franchise, and
to note with disappointment that these members are all too
few.
Signed, for the JAT election committee
John Burton, Chair
Kathleen Taji
Ron Jones
15 March 1997
March Meeting Report by Evan D. A. Geisinger
I am a translator by default-- it is the best-paying thing I
have done, and I don't hate doing it. But actually, I much
prefer thinking about how people translate (and _should_
translate) to actually doing my job. For me, the best thing
about the traitor business is that it affords me a ton of
opportunities to theorize (rhapsodize?) on what it means to
"mean" things with language(s). This time, however, I shall try
to repress the ivory-tower cognitive scientist trapped within
me, and focus instead on the practicalities of the *business*
in which most of us are engaged. Any statements I make about
the industry in general are based on personal experience and
extrapolation, and not on comprehensive research or surveys of
my peers, so there will no doubt be errors and lies (caveat
lector). I hope that those of you who discover them will &
quot;say" so by writing further articles, helping me to make
this into a series. The focus of this (first) installment, will
be the evaluation and improvement of translation quality, but
please allow me to use the following grandiose title, in the
hopes that it will spur me (and you!) on to write more in the
future:
"On the Translation Industry and the Japanese-to-English
Translation Market."
Chapter 1: Translation Quality: An Informal Shot at
Formalization
Given the proportion of lucratively employed translators that
work in technical or scientific fields, I have long found it a
bit strange that there is so little literature devoted to
formal or "scientific" treatments of the process of translation
itself. Perhaps we are all so busy actually _doing_ our work
that we don't have time to write about it. While personally I
do not believe that rigorous analytical methods are the be-all
and end-all of effective inquiry, I do think that they have
_something_ to contribute, and I have a theoretical bent, so
I'll try applying them in this article.
One advantage of formalization is that it can help bring out
similarities (and contrasts) between different issues, and
thereby serve as a tool for analogical reasoning. Formal models
have all sorts of other things going for them, as well, such as
making it easier to win verbal arguments by seeming
authoritative :->, or convince oneself that one is doing an
OK job as a translator. Also, and perhaps most importantly if
you are among those who have occasional doubts that they might
eventually lose their jobs to machines, formalization brings
home how difficult a task it is to put a human-though concept
expressed in human language into language close to something a
computer can understand.
Formalizing Translation
If you are going to do something, it is generally a good idea
to get your definitions straight first. So if we're going to
play around with formalizing translation quality, we may as
well start with the meanings of the individual terms.
Unfortunately, though, defining translation is a hairy
business--so much so, in fact, that one popular (expensive,
unabridged) dictionary takes the easy way out and says,
essentially, that translating is taking something [their word!]
in one language and changing it into another language.
Fortunately, though, most of us have a rather more concrete
idea of what we mean when we use the term: something like
"taking a text in one language, and producing a text with the
same meaning in another language.& quot; This is quite a
bit better for our purposes, and particularly mine-- since it
builds an easy segue into the next (and main) issue at hand:
what do we mean by "a text with the same meaning"?
My proposed answer to this is that we mean a lot of things by
it, to different degrees, and depending on circumstances and
context. A few examples should help show what I mean:
A1. Kare-wa mou kaeta.
A2. Him already went home.
A3. Him already goned home.
A4. He went home.
A5. He left already.
A6. Leave. Go home. No here.
B1. Gomen kudasaaai!
B2. Is anybody here/home?
B3. Is there anybody here?
C1. O-saki-ni shitsurei shimasu.
C2. See ya tomorrow.
C3. 'Sorry to leave you all here working, but I'll be
on my way now.
C4. I'm outa here!
Depending on what you mean by "mean," you might consider any
two examples from the same (initial-letter) group above as
meaning the same thing. You also might decide that *no* two
sentences can mean the same thing if they differ in any way at
all. Some people would say that no two sentences * ever* mean
exactly the same thing, even if they are identical (since the
circumstances of their use/reading will be different). Finally,
there are some prescriptivists out there who will say that A2,
A3, and A6 don't mean * anything* in English. (Question: is
this the same as saying that they are *not* English?).
Anyway, it is not my purpose here to get into a discussion of
linguistic philosophy or semiotics. I just want to bring up the
fact that "meaning& quot; includes numerous considerations,
including what is often called illocutionary force (i.e. the
effect of the communicative act), which for A1-A6 would be,
say, "the transfer of information from the speaker to the
person the speaker is responding to, indicating that the person
being looked for is not present." This term is also used as a
near-synonym for "pragmatic meaning," which could be
non-technically defined as "what you * really* mean by saying
something"--that is, if you say "can you turn the volume down
for a minute?" your pragmatic meaning is a request that I do
you that favor. In contrast to this, the "semantic"meaning of
the thing you said is less immediately useful: viz. "are you
capable of turning the volume down for a minute." Even the most
advanced of computer language-processing are generally unable
to get beyond such & quot;raw semantics," and even at this
raw level, they would probably interpret the example even more
"literally," as meaning +/- & quot;are you able to
progressively lower the volume continuously over a one- minute
period of time?" (Finally, let me take advantage of this one
more time to poke fun at most machine-translation (MT) systems:
on your average MT system, it would be nothing more than luck
if you got this result--given the paucity of the knowledge base
included, the computer might just as well interpret "turn the
volume down" as meaning "refuse the volume's
invitation/offer"!)
If we take the pragmatic/semantic distinction and deal with it
in less technical terminology, we will come to the fact that
most people have some inkling of there being a difference
between the literal meaning of a sentence, and its connotation.
Humans generally have trouble thinking _as_ literally as
computers (thank god!), so our layperson's view of "literal"
meaning probably does not go all the way down to the
"continuously over a one-minute period of time" level. On the
other hand, the lay term "connotation& quot; is pretty
inclusive--it covers everything else that the sentence &
quot;leads you to know/suspect." Thus, Ex. A6 includes the
connotation that the speaker is a non-native English user (or
is joking around), and "I am perfectly willing to help you"
implies different things connotatively than "Please let me know
if I can help." Among other things, connotations include
information on the attitudes of the sentence-crafter to the
subject at hand, her relationship to the addressee, her level
of education, mood, sense of humor, and goals in
communicating.
Anyway, that is no doubt enough of a general overview for now.
For the rest of this column, I'm going to focus in on one small
task, so that I can go into more detail: translation of
nonfiction, non-"literary",#1 denotation-rich expository prose
that doesn't have human-to-human interaction as its principal
topic. Examples of this would be computer manuals, software
manuals, research papers, patents, and weather reports. Two of
my reasons for choosing this genre are that it forms the
mainstay of my job, and that it is the explicit target of most
MT development projects.
#1 By which I mean written in a bland or neutral tone/voice.
[In the interest of low-ASCII compatibility, I will use #n in
the place of asterixes, with the corresponding footnotes at the
end of each paragraph, reserving *this* and _this_ for
indications of emphasis].
I am also going to make the above rather arbitrary distinction
between & quot;denotative" meaning and
connotative/pragmatic meaning(s)#1-- the former is the
vague/fuzzy concept of the text's "factual content,& quot;
the latter is everything else. In addition, it will be useful
to differentiate between the meaning "embodied" in a text and
the meaning conveyed by that text when read by a particular
individual.#2
#1 I realize that I did not give a clearly defined borderline
between the two. This is left as a pleasant exercise for the
reader, provided she has a year or two to spare.
#2 (Actually, I believe meaning not to exist except when it is
conveyed...) These two distinctions have a lot in common.
Taking up the latter for a moment, let's look at another
example sentence:
Ex.1 Windows 3.1 was a highly innovative--nay,
*revolutionary*--product.
Not!
This sentence probably produces slightly different reactions
in readers who have been exposed to the pattern before than it
does in those that have not. It may also produce different
reactions in those who have clear aural memories of the kind of
intonation implied. The fact is that, in addition to coming
from different dialect backgrounds, we also each speak and use
different idiolects (i.e. personal dialects, including
personally groupings of actively-used vs. only- passive
vocabulary, KUCHI-GUSE, etc.).
Formalizing Translation-- Really!
OK. So "translation" is taking a text that has certain
denotative and connotative meanings for certain readers when
read in its source language, and producing therefrom a target
language text that conveys *certain of*#1 those same meanings
for the target-language readers who will read it. Great! Now
all we have to do is fill in all of those "certains." First, it
will be useful to go back through your memories of all of the
[insert native language here] letters and such that you have
corrected for your foreign friends, students and employers. If
you think in particular of the changes you made that were not
& quot;just plain grammatical errors," you will perhaps
find that you made many of them principally to improve the
text's style and/or tone. For example, if you were correcting
an original that included one of the sentences in Ex. A-C
below, you might have had reason to re-write it as one of
D1-D3.
#1 Because, "all of" is an impossibility.
A Mr. Malcolm proffered his resignation on the
25th.
B. Mr. Malcolm gave them his resignation on the
25th.
C. Mr. Malcolm handed in his resignation on the
25th.
D1. Mr. Malcolm remitted his resignation on the
25th.
D2. Mr. Malcolm submitted his resignation on the
25th.
D3. Mr. Malcolm tendered his resignation on the
25th.
Likely reasons for such a change would be to improve the
"flow" (fluency) from the preceding prose, to maintain a
consistent register (i.e. level of formality in
vocabulary-usage and sentence-structure), or just because you
know that "tender a resignation" is an accepted collocation,
and decided it would be appropriate to add that bit of
"polish." These reasons all have to do with increasing the
impression of well-writtenness or eloquence. To be brutally
frank, you made such "stylistic" changes to give the reader an
unmerited impression of the author's writing ability, or
conversely to avoid the possibility of having your author
viewed as uneducated or lazy. "Tonal" changes, on the other
hand, are made to prevent the reader from getting the wrong (or
in some cases, true) impression of the author's *attitude* or
opinions. An example I remember is a letter I corrected for a
FUKU-SHACHOU here who was inviting a client-company VP from the
US for a visit. I changed "I am willing to invite you to
Japan..." to & quot;I would be very happy if you could
visit us here in Japan..." when a conversation with the author
confirmed my suspicion that he was not the least bit reluctant,
and really *did* want the guy to come.
At a minimum, a single-language text requires us to be aware
of the existence of three entities: the author(s), the
topics/subjects, and the reader(s). (The denotative information
in the texts I am considering is concerned almost only with the
topics/subjects [I mean the text's TAI-SHOU]). Given the three
parties involved, and given that the author is the one who
chose the words, the tone and style (that is, the connotative
meaning) often hint at the author's attitudes toward
him/herself, the topics/subjects he or she has written about,
and/or the reader. An author can adopt a tone and style that
shows that she considers herself an impartial authority to be
trusted implicitly, or ones that indicates that she is less
than pleased at the reader's request in a previous interaction.
Likewise, an author writing a blurb about a program's sorting
functions may write differently for the outside of a package
(which can help induce a purchase) than for the instruction
manual within, and still differently yet for an in- company
memo on future improvements.
We are now much closer to a definition of translation that I
think may be worth using. We want to produce a target-language
text that conveys the same meanings as the source-language
text, where "meanings" includes denotation,
author's-attitude-towards-self, author's-attitudes-towards-the-
subjects/topics, and author's-attitude-towards-the-reader. Oh
yes, we also shouldn't forget that we usually want to produce
the impression of the author being a good writer (and perhaps
well-educated), as well. This last, however, begs the question
of fidelity vs. naturalness. If we produce something
immeasurably more polished than the original, are we A. worthy
of the unrelenting praise and indebtedness of our client, or B.
due to be flogged and ejected bodily from the translators'
union? To answer this (and finally bring this opus to a close),
I will focus on what my real-world non-literary clients desire
of me, as indicated in the title of the next section.
Traduttore, Prostituto.
My clients want me to help them reach *their* goals. They do
not want blind fidelity. They *do* want me to correct their
errors, and often to improve their writing. They want their
target-language texts to serve the purposes they have in mind,
irrespective of how exactly this corresponds to what their
source- language texts succeed in doing to native
source-language readers. To this I say: "You pays da money. You
da boss." I believe that I am in a service industry, and do not
stand on any self-image of professionalism, unless they want me
to put my name on the finished product (i.e. very rarely). I am
happiest when I produce a text that I feel will do what my
client wants. It is therefore imperative that I _know_ what
s/he wants; that is: the purpose(s) of the translation. I can
generally get a _relatively_ clear idea of this from the
Japanese source-text itself-- e.g. if it is an instruction
manual for a FAX machine-- but there almost always remains at
least a possibility that the client had a different objective
in mind (e.g. was having the manual translated as information
on which to base a major purchase decision).
I often get work indirectly (agents, secretaries, editors), so
I have often been in the situation where I have little idea of
who will be reading the text I am asked to produce. This to me
is unpleasant, and antithetical to what I want to do in order
to consider myself a purveyor of high-quality service. I think
that agency mediation generally leads to lower quality in
translation, unless the agent is both clearly aware of what
sorts of information can be useful to the translator, and
committed to obtaining it from the client and passing it on.
Even when the agent is an angel, however, I feel strongly that
translations that could not benefit from a single (usually
quite short) telephone call with the client are few and far
between (if they exist at all). In a text of more than a
sentence or three, there is almost always something that is
worth checking "at the source.& quot; Whether it be the
proffered romanization of a person's name (or even the
pronunciation itself, given Japanese parents' creativity), or
the English name of a katakana-yclept product, there is usually
a point to be verified. More often still, there is a phrase
that can be interpreted as modifying either of two different
nouns, or a word that is either a typing error or a creative
piece of new jargon (but not both), or a word that is an
error-- clearly out of place--but that could be corrected
either by replacing it with another, or by adding a phrase
before it that would make its appearance follow naturally#1
(but at the same time change the basic statement being made).
Finally, there are numerous cases where, if one is going to
make a phone-call anyway to check on such points, it can be
fast and efficient to "cheat" in the translation itself--asking
the author for the English equivalent of a technical term or
for a bit of key knowledge the translator lacks.
#1 This often happens in technical papers, where a paragraph
describing a mathematical proof or somesuch can easily have
three or four multi-phrase clauses (e.g. "while, if F is
assumed _not_ to be divisible by Y(Q), which is itself odd but
not prime, and ..."), and one accidental omission could be
& quot;fixed" in numerous ways.
While it is often possible to find the information one needs
on the Internet or in the minds of HONYAKU-list participants,
and while there is nothing better that having an advanced and
in-depth knowledge of all of the fields (and literatures
thereof) in which one translates, if they are phrased the right
way, direct questions to the author of the original can be
sometimes be both more efficient, and better business. An
author may be proud of the fact that s/he knows both how to
apply Raulmann's Postulate and how to spell it in Roma-ji. And
often, s/ he will be more than willing to give you a quick
pointer on the Model Earthquake system, especially if you
indicate by your choice of words that you already know the
basics, but were wondering if, for example, there was an
established placement of the seismic-response sensors defined
for use with each one. This can frequently clear up the
interpretation of a sentence you were trying to grapple with,
and if played right, can also impress your client with your
seriousness of purpose, etc. Also, even in non-technical work,
authors have been known to appreciate talking with someone
intent on getting at the & quot;true meaning" of a prose
they have sweated over. Of course, if your client is very busy
or is not the type of person who want's to be bothered with
& quot;trivial details," then the call should not be made,
but I have the feeling on about 80% of my calls that the client
was happy that I got in touch, and that their opinion of my
service had improved.#1 If they seem busy, then I limit myself
to a question or two, and the call takes five minutes or less.
In general, though, I probably average 10-15 minutes, and spend
20+ for a hundred-pager, making appointments in advance (when I
first start the job).
#1 At the JAT meeting, one person mentioned that his clients
had actually expressed gratitude for catching mistakes they had
made before they got into print. I've had this happen once or
twice, too.
Remember, translation is a very atypical service industry, in
that most of the consumers have little or no idea of the
quality of the product they receive. A phone call or a "note
from the translator" written in the client's native language
can turn you from a "black box," which magically produces a
text purported to mean the same thing as the text fed into it,
into a living, breathing, service-oriented human being,
earnestly striving to produce a product that accurately
reflects the author's (or client's) intended meaning. This is a
definite plus, businesswise. Moreover, it can help to
differentiate the quality of the product that _you_ produce
from that of other (perhaps cheaper) translators, who often do
not even take the time to clarify obvious cut-and- paste errors
or omissions, and the like, translating them as-is as
gibberish. The consumer you call may not be able to judge your
product directly, but s/he can at least see that you are
serious about your job.
You may by now have guessed that I would phrase my "final"
standard of translation quality more or less as follows: The
extent to which the translated text has the effects that the
client desires it to have on its target audience. These
"effects" will generally center on the factual- informative
one, and include to varying degrees the creation of various
impressions (most often intended to be positive)--of the
product described, the author, the company producing the
document, etc. I have a more quantitative check-list based on
these that I use when I am actually getting paid to evaluate
the quality of a translation, but since such jobs are not
common, I won't go into it here. I will summarize, however, how
I go about putting translations on a one dimensional scale for
comparison. First I select the weighted combination of goals
that I think the original text was written to achieve. The
items included are usually EC (Expository/Comprehension = to
convey factual content) and OI and PI (Organizational
Impression and Product Impression = to create positive
impressions of each of these. Sometimes I add AI (Author's
Impression on the reader) and/or RM (Reader Motivation =
"hooking" the reader, or keeping him/her reading), as well. If
I include an item at all, it means that the worst imaginable
failure in terms of that item would be "fatal" for the
translation as a whole, too. I weight the items relatively to
show how central/essential they are to the purpose of the text,
and come up with a combination like: 80% EC, 5% OI, 15% PI (a
technical manual for an API, such as for programmers writing
plug-ins for Netscape Navigator), or 50% EC, 10% OI, 40% PI
(the back-panel blurb on the outside of a software box). I then
basically go through sentence by sentence and give points for
each category, and take a weighted average.#1
#1 Actually, I make things a bit more complicated by using a
formula that allows me to fail an entire translation for a
major get-the-company-in-three-lawsuits error, even if it
occurs mainly in a category weighted 1%.
Actually Problems and Preferred Procedures
I actually wanted to focus this article on the kinds of
problems that actually cause translators to stop and vacillate,
re-translate, and then end up deciding to go back to
translations they had in the first place. The ones that eat up
five minutes of your time for a single sentence in a
translation that has otherwise been going smoothly at ten times
that speed. The ones that you find yourself going back to
correct _again_ even after you have finished half of the
following paragraph. I had hoped that providing a method of
evaluating quality, I could bring up the questions _I_ want to
ask my fellow honyakkers, and then compare the ways different
answers rated using that scale. I wanted to do this as a way of
addressing a sneaking suspicion I have: that my translations
might be better if I were freer in dividing and re-ordering
clauses and sentences from the original. I obviously did not do
this. This article seems to have ended, in fact, more or less
where the JAT meeting ended: with some overall ideas on
translation quality for a job as a whole, and with a suggestion
for " customer service," but without continuing on to cover the
clause-to- paragraph level questions that really interest me
and cause me trouble. I guess that will have to wait for next
time. For now, here's a preview/proposal (co- authors and
co-talkers BOSHUU-CHUU).
Wrasslin' with Real Translation Conundra
Translation is a continual struggle to meet multiple,
mutually-conflicting constraints--even in the ideal
circumstance where one has a well-written source text that one
understands fully. The perfect word "meaningwise& quot; for
a given kanji-compound may be a term that is so obscure and
erudite that it clashes impossibly with the tone of the
translation so far. In this case, you have a conflict between
the constraints of consistent tone and of denotative fidelity
to the original. The next-closest English word may also be
quite acceptable, but it may have two meanings, and require
another word to be hyphenated to it in order to limit it to one
meaning you want. But the hyphenated compound may invite a
mis-reading in which it seems to be an adjective modifying
whatever comes next. So you reverse the word-order in the
following phrase, and voila!. This kind of word-jiggling and
phrase juggling goes on at a semi-conscious (or unconscious)
level all the time when I#1 translate, and I am not usually
aware of any major difficulty in finding a phrasing that fits
acceptably. Most of the time, I think, a jiggle or two (or
none) is all a clause or sentence needs to become an acceptable
translation, but occasionally all of the jiggles one applies
seem to result in unsatisfactory situations that require
jiggles of their own, and I end up with a sentence that I have
to put off until later, or that I feel I have had to take
unacceptable liberties with. Do other honyakkers have this
experience? Sometimes I come back to one of these sentences,
and find that it becomes quite good writing if only I break it
in two and rearrange its pieces, or add a whole connective
clause, absent in the original. To what extent are these kinds
of changes OK? Can I take a piece of one sentence and insert it
instead into a neighboring sentence to make the resulting
English sound more "natural"? How about a non- neighboring
sentence. Please send me#2 your examples and opinions/problems,
and lets argue these questions through!
#1I don't know if this is also the case for my colleagues,
because introspective investigations by working translators are
almost absent in the literature of linguistics and
translation-theory.
#2 Private e-mail, or-- to avoid the necessity of inputting
the original-- phone/ FAX (03) 5399-8889
KENKYUSHA'S New JAPANESE-ENGLISH DICTIONARY (Kenkyusha GG)
Survey
先日Honyakuで、「研究社新和英大辞典に変な英訳が掲載されている」との報告があ
りましたので、ほかにもありませんかと呼びかけたところ、たくさんの例が寄せられま
した。
******* 最初の呼びかけ ******
... GG's fourth edition was published in 1974 (I got mine in
1980 ? fifth impression- for 7,000 yen) and it hasn't been
revised since then. That means almost all 'yakkers I guess are
using this same edition which is outdated and not flawless at
all. Among the editorial staff of this edition there was only
one foreigner i.e.立正大学教授ジーン・レーマン (Gene Lehman)
who served as an editorial consultant and who probably didn't
check all the renderings.
What other "wrong", "odd" and "funny" English can you find in
this dictionary? Please send me some examples, together with
your comments (and the version you have and how much you've
paid for it) to me at: aya-sato@ga2.so-net.or.jp
If I get any contributions I will compile a GG STORY and put
it in the coming JAT (electronic) bulletins via JAT-LIST.
********* いつ改定されるの？ *********
MESSAGE No.1
Yes. I wrote to Kenkyusha in Aug. 96 and was informed that
the Fifth Edition is not to be expected before the year
2000.
Ray Roman J.D.
* * * *
MESSAGE No.2
You might also send a copy to Mr. Kazuhiko Nagai
Kenkyusha
2-11-3 Fujimi
Chiyoda-ku, Tokyo 102
He is the coordinator of the revision of the GG which is going
on now. I might also add that anyone else who has concrete
suggestions on how to write up the definitions and example
sentences should also send them to Mr. Nagai. I've told Mr.
Nagai about the HONYAKU list, so you can tell him you heard
about him from me on HONYAKU.
>PS Does anybody know if GG's revision work is going on or
not?
Yes it is. Right now the estimate is that it will take about
four years.
Kenneth Jones
* * * *
MESSAGE No.3
Be careful: Kenkyusha has been known to not take kindly to
criticisms of GG,even when valid. In the meantime, Reader's
Plus in a much better work, and Kenkyusha has put out another
J>E dictionary, of about the same size as GG but with larger
type, that is much better (I can't remember the title, but it's
supposed to be geared toward university-level users).
I hope that any future version of GG would come out on
CR-ROM.
-Jim Lockhart
****** 腎臓とは？ ********
MESSAGE No. 1
(4th Ed. 1974)
肌合い *HadaAi*
私と〜の合った人
A man of my own kidney
彼は私と〜が違う
He is a man of different stamp from me.
ああいう〜の人は嫌いだ
I don't like a man of that stamp
(4th Ed. 1974)
David Eunice
* * * *
MESSAGE No.2
私と〜の合った人
A man of my own kidney
>Do you mean that this kind of usage is not common at all,
or outdated,
> or you don't say "my own..."?
I can't really imagine anyone other than a wizened old don at
Oxford or a pompous QC saying anything like that, unless they
were non-native speakers who had just donated a kidney.
Sorry, I was up all night on some contentless CI with slogans,
So I can't even come up with a more colloquial equivalent. If
this had been in one of the slogans (actually it was 肌で) I
would have loved to have put in "Two minds of the same
kidney".
David Eunice
* * * *
MESSAGE No.3
David Eunice wrote:
>> 私と〜の合った人
>> A man of my own kidney
>I can't really imagine anyone [...] saying anything like
that,
>unless they were non-native speakers who had just donated
a kidney.
>[...] I can't even come up with a more colloquial
equivalent.
Sorry if there's some duplication because I missed the
beginning of this thread,
but how about "a man after my own heart"? That is quite common
in English, but I can imagine non-native speakers being rather
worried!
Ben Jones
* * * *
MESSAGE No.4
Ben Jones wrote:
> David Eunice wrote:
>
> >> 私と〜の合った人
> >> A man of my own kidney
>
> >I can't really imagine anyone [...] saying anything
like that,
> >unless they were non-native speakers who had just
donated a
kidney.
> >[...] I can't even come up with a more colloquial
equivalent.
>
> Sorry if there's some duplication because I missed the
beginning
> of this thread, but how about "a man after my own heart"?
That is
> quite common in English, but I can imagine non-native
speakers
> being rather worried!
Yes, as a non-native speaker of English, I'm worried and would
avoid using it <
g>. "Hadaai no au/awanai" basically means
congenial/uncongenial.
But if I, a woman, said "he is a man after my own heart,"
wouldn't
you misunderstand me?
Joking aside, I guess one of the reasons a lot of example in
those popular E-J/J-
E/E-E dictionaries look outdated or peculiar is that many of
them are cited from
literary works such as novels, or made up based on them.
Mieko Nishi
* * * *
MESSAGE No.5
For a twisted person such as me, there is an alternate, albeit
wrong,
interpretation.
> But if I, a woman, said "he is a man after my own
heart,"
> wouldn't you misunderstand me?
Although there is room for romantic misunderstanding, probably
not. The
phrase is common enough that the meaning is quite clear.
Now if he specialised in heart transplants or was a cereal
(yes it is the wrong
word) killer we could turn the screw even further.
John Zimet
* * * *
MESSAGE No.6
In a very colloquial setting (rural Ohio), I've heard kidneys
as referring to a
persons brain so "a man of my own kidney" could be taken as a
person with the same way of thinking.
Alan Engel
* * * *
MESSAGE No.7
I've come across "a man of a different kidney", but not "of my
own kidney". This would presumably mean much the same as "a
man after my own heart". Both sound to my (middle-aged male
English)
ears like the kind of archaic expression middle-aged
Englishmen use in jocular
fashion to one another. The only context in which I ever hear
"a man after
my own heart" is when somebody suggests knocking off work for
the day
and going down the pub (idiomatic usage in parts of the UK at
least for going
down TO the pub).
Graham Healey
* * * *
MESSAGE No.8
Going down to the pub too early and too often will do you
heart and kidneys no
good.
Greg Moore
* * * *
MESSAGE No.9
An acquaintance of mine who had worked for a publisher of
J>E dictionaries
said that the editors at her company never took anything out
as they produced
new editions, so old-fashioned or obsolete definitions
remained in the new
editions *sono mama.* The example she gave was *hectic,*
which used to
mean *suffering from a high fever.* That usage is obsolete,
but some J>E
dictionaries still list it as the first definition. I don't
know if Kenkyusha retains
old defintions , but perhaps "a man of my own kidney" was a
slang
term in 1905 or whenever Kenkyusha published its first J>E
dictionary.
Twenty-three skiddooily yours,
Karen Sandness
* * * *
MESSAGE No.10
Perhaps this explains why the best definitions in the GG are
usually at the end--
they must be just tacking them on with each new edition!
Naruhodily yours,
Adam Rice
* * * *
MESSAGE No.11
Honyaku@EMARKT.COM wrote:
> of this thread, but how about "a man after my own heart"?
That is
> quite common in English, but I can imagine non-native
speakers
> being rather worried!
Yes, this was picked up by ( I think) John Cleese of Monty
Python, in his &
quot;word association football" monologue.
Heart is a more common in metaphors than the liver and kidney,
I think must
be on the way out.
David Eunice
* * * *
MESSAGE No.12
Mieko Nishi wrote:
> "Hadaai no au/awanai" basically means
congenial/uncongenial.
> But if I, a woman, said "he is a man after my own
heart,"
> wouldn't you misunderstand me?
That's an interesting take on this idiom. I think that Ben
Jones was on the right
track in trying to come up with an 'organic' metaphor.
On the negative side, "can't stomach" comes to mind.
> Joking aside, I guess one of the reasons a lot of
example
> in those popular E-J/J-E/E-E dictionaries look
outdated
> or peculiar is that many of them are cited from
> literary works such as novels, or made up based on
them.
An odd choice, if the purpose is to offer a guide to
structures to reproduce in
one's own speech. Practically, however, I suppose that is all
that could be
expected at the time that the dictionary was compiled.
> ああいう〜の人は嫌いだ
> I don't like a man of that stamp
Am I the only one who finds this odd in the singular. (I also
can't help thinking
that the profile of England's future king will, in all
likelihood, be on the postage
stamps.)
David Eunice
* * * *
MESSAGE No.13
Greg Moore wrote:
> Going down to the pub too early and too often will do
your heart
> and kidneys no good.
Being unable to stomach criticism, I shall have to go and have
a drink before I
vent my spleen on somebody. :-) (By the way, I came across
:-) as a piece of
punctuation in Prosper Merimee's novella "Carmen" (English
trans)
the other day. Don't know the date of first publication, but
Merimee died in
1870. Is this the earliest recorded smiley face?)
G.H.Healey
* * *
コメント：
「肌合い」とKidneyをめぐって様々な意見が出ました。英語のkidney
は
ほかにも kidney<-shaped> bean, kidney<-contained>
pie などと使われていますが、
日本語の「腎臓」の比喩は何もありませ
んね。心臓は「毛がはえている」とか言われ
ますが。
****** まだまだ他にもありました ********
MESSAGE No.1
Hope it's not too late to contribute to your Green Goddess
Hall O' Shame. As
soon as I stopped looking, I found one!
里子 [SATOGO] : farm out (a baby with a person)
赤ん坊を〜に出した : The baby
was farmed out / The baby was placed out at nurse.
jenny@ If I get much busier, I may have to start farming out
work! (里業）
Jenny Nazak
「里子」に関しては「学童疎開」との違いとか、里子の由来なども議論されました。
* * *
MESSAGE No.2
One of my favourites is on p.1491 of GG:
千篇一律 (senpen ichiritsu): monotony, humdrumness, grooviness
(??!!), lack of
variety.
Regards
Tim Leeney, London
千篇一律：多くの詩がいずれも同じ調子で変化のないこと。転じて、多くの物事がみな
同じ調子で、おもしろみのないこと（大辞泉）
* * *
MESSAGE No.3
How about this one:
"In profile she is not so fine, but her face is very
charming."
This was printed on a pair of sweatpants I bought in Japan.
Imagine my surprise
when 10 years later I found it as an example sentence in
GG!
Cassandra Decker
コメント：もとの日本語は「彼女の横顔は大したことはないが、（正面からみると）美
しい」でしょうか？
後記：みなさん、どうもありがとうございました。研究社新和英大辞典の（面白い、変
な、間違った）訳例は、まだまだ募集中です。
Emily Shibata-Sato
aya-sato@pp.iij4u.or.jpまでメールをお寄せください。
*************************************
The Japan Association of Translators (JAT) is a nonprofit
association dedicated to
serving the interests of individual translators. Unless
otherwise stated, opinions
expressed in JAT Bulletin articles are solely those of
individual contributors and
do not necessarily reflect the views of the Japan Association
of Translators.
Bulletin Index
Top | Home | Feedback
