|
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| JAT MEETING ON JULY 18 | Richard Thieme |
| JAT Board Report for June 1998 | Kathy Taji |
| Membership Secretary's Report | Jeremy Whipple |
| Working for an Agency - Article #2 | Charles Reindle |
| 夏休みのおすすめ本 | Emily Shibata-Sato |
| Japan Style Sheet Review | Tom Gally |
| (From Honyaku) How to order the Japan Style Sheet | Fred Uleman |
| USPTO to Make Full-Text Patent Data Available for Free | Bill Lise |
| The Battle for Nihongoka of Nihongo Continues | Bill Lise |
Katsumasa Ishii will be the speaker for JAT's monthly meeting from 2:30 to 4:30 p.mon July18, at the Shiba Seinen Kaikan. Mr. Ishii is a 税理士 and will speak on basic accounting and documentation for a small business. As translators we come to our selected profession from all walks of life, and not necessarily from a business environment. Once we become active commercially, however, it is very important to watch the bottom line. As a professional in tax accounting, Mr. Ishii has considerable experience in assisting small companies with their business needs. Those who are thinking about starting up as a free-lancer, or setting up their own company, are encouraged to attend. As always there will be a nijikai after the meeting, to which everyone is invited to attend. The meeting will be held at Shiba Seinen Kaikan, 2-1-20 Shiba Minato-ku, Tokyo.
Richard Thieme
The JAT Directors' meeting was held on June 20, 1998 from 12:30 to 2:30 at the Shiba Seinen Kaikan. It was attended by William Lise, Robert Oliver, Emily Shibata-Sato, Kathleen Taji, Richard Thieme, and Leslie Tkach. George Tokikuni and Jeremy Whipple were absent and Judy Wakabayashi in Australia was not in attendance. The following items were discussed.
Item 1
Cash Flow Report
The Cash Flow Report for April 1, 1997 to June 30, 1998 for
the IJET-9 Conference was given by JAT Treasurer,
Robert Oliver. There was a total revenue inflow of
5,448,532 yen generated by the IJET-9 Conference and
a total outflow of 4,218, 593 yen to cover IJET-9 expenditures
as of June 20, 1998. At the time of this reporting, there was
an overall remaining balance of 1,229,939 yen generated
by the IJET-9 Conference. However, this balance does not
include expenditures for printing and other costs which have
not yet been paid.
The total inflow of revenue generated by JAT dues for the period of April 1, 1998 to June 20, 1998 was 540,468 yen and the total cash outflow to cover various JAT expenditures was 338, 648 yen. The overall total balance was 201,820 yen for this period.
Item 2
The Website Committee Report
William Lise reported that several
new articles were put up on the JAT Website and corrections to
directors' addresses were also made.
Leslie Tkach reported that a few changes will be made on the website to allow the JAT Bulletin to be presented in a more logically ordered sequence. She will also be reviewing and selecting the IJET-9 photographs for the website in July. Suggestions were made by other directors to change the photographs periodically and the possibility of creating a What's New site on the JAT website where the photographs will be rotated was discussed.
A special link for the JAT Board Report on the members-only site will be created on the membership index page and there will be separate files in a folder called Board Reports which will enable members to access Board Reports according to year.
Item 3
FIT Conference in Seoul
Fred Uleman, JAT member, was asked to represent JAT at the
FIT Conference in Seoul, Korea by Judy Wakabayashi, FIT Relations
Director. Fred has agreed to represent JAT in this capacity.
A meishi will be prepared for Fred with the title, Acting JAT
Representative, which will also include Judy Wakabayashi's name
and title as FIT Relations Director.
William Lise will be in charge of preparing the meishi for Fred Uleman. A meishi will also be prepared for Richard Thieme, JAT Program Director.
A special meeting of the presidents of the four other Japanese translation associations that are members of FIT was held on July 3, 1998 to discuss the issue of a regional FIT conference to be held in Tokyo in 2001. This meeting was attended by William Lise, as President of JAT and Fred Uleman, as Acting JAT Representative on behalf of Judy Wakabayashi.
Item 4
JAT Website Forum on Late/Nonpaying Translation Clients
The pros and cons of creating a JAT Website forum listing late/nonpaying
translation clients on the members-only site were discussed at length.
It was decided that such a forum would not be created at the present time,
since the JAT-List was already fulfilling that function for JAT members.
Item 5
JAT Bulletin
There will be no JAT Bulletin for the month of August. Emily Shibata-Sato
will compile a July/August issue. She is in the process of preparing a
test HTML file of the Bulletin which will be uploaded by Leslie Tkach.
Item 6
Bookshelf Project
William Lise, Leslie Tkach, and George Tokikuni will form a committee
for the bookshelf project. The committee will require one person to
compile the data base and five to six JAT members to select the books.
George Tokikuni will chair the committee.
Item 7
IJET
Several venues have been proposed for a future IJET down the line -
Osaka, Nagoya, and Perth. Of these three venues, Mayumi Nishioka,
JAT member, has actively come forward to request the Board's
permission to organize an IJET in Osaka. Due to time constraints,
a consensus was not reached at this meeting and a decision on this
matter is still pending. The most divisive issue among the directors
was whether to hold an Osaka IJET on a JAT "on year" or an "off year"
(in lieu of an overseas IJET). Further discussions will be carried out
online by the directors.
Item 8
Withholding Tax Issue
Richard Thieme who is in charge of the withholding tax issue was
unable to give his report due to the lack of time. Discussions on
this issue are still pending.
The next JAT Board of Directors meeting will be held on July 18, 1998 at the Shiba Seinen Kaikan from 12:30 to 2:30.
Compiled by Kathleen Taji JAT Recording Secretary
I'm writing this report on July 6 from the cool Atlantic seashore of Massachusetts as I prepare to return to torrid Tokyo (to arrive on July 10). I left Tokyo on June 16, and Kathleen Taji kindly filled in for me during the period when I was having trouble sending and receiving e-mail; she also sent out directories to new members.
As of July 1, JAT had 279 members, representing an increase of 20 during the course of June. Of these, 118, or 42%, were living overseas. The stream of new membership applications made things a little hectic for Kathy and me, but of course we're delighted to see the association continue to grow like this.
Jeremy Whipple membership@jat.org
Please send your contributions for September JAT Bulletin to editor@jat.org by the end of August. Submissions should be in simple text format.
Bill LISE, President president@jat.org
会長 W. A. リゼ
Bob OLIVER, Treasurer treasurer@jat.org
会計担当 ロバート・オリバー
Emily SHIBATA-SATO, Publications editor@jat.org
会報担当 佐藤 綾子
Kathleen TAJI, Recording Secretary: ktaji@gol.com
記録担当 タジ・キャサリン
Richard THIEME, Program rdthieme@gol.com
会合担当 リチャード・ティーマ
Leslie TKACH, Website tkach@gol.com
ホームページ担当 タック・レスリー
George TOKIKUNI, IJET and Special Projects PFG01116@niftyserve.or.jp
IJET&特別プロジェクト担当 時國 滋夫
Judy WAKABAYASHI, FIT Relations j.wakabayashi@mailbox.uq.edu.au.
FIT担当 若林ジュディー
Jeremy WHIPPLE, Membership Secretary membership@jat.org
会員担当 ジェレミー・ウィップル
To learn more about JAT, please visit our Web site at http://www.jat.org/.
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.
c) 1998 Japan Association of Translators, All rights reserved, including those of republishing in any media, including but not limited to printed and electronic media. Individual authors of articles in the Bulletin retain copyright to their articles, permitting them to use the articles as they see fit, including granting permission for reprinting in other media.
By Charles Reindle
The world has entered a new age with the advent of the Internet "Super" Highway. As a result, my two years at a translation agency have seen tremendous changes in our computer environment, because our success depends on upgrading our equipment ahead of the client. But it seems like only yesterday that all we needed to get the job done was a word processor.
Before the development of Windows95 and adoption of the Internet by our clients, we used a word processor called Oasys (Pronounced "oh-ah-she-sue", with the accent on "ah"). Our word processors were not connected by a network, so all work was saved and delivered to the client on floppies. We also had a few DOS computers, and one Apple PowerPC 8100 for the occasional job in Quark, doing layout for Chinese documents, and receiving completed work from our freelance translators by NiftyServe or CompuServe. Thanks to Bill Gates, our simple life was about to become extinct.
When Windows95 came on the scene, our clients upgraded to Win95 and jumped on the I-way. So did we. We made three major changes. One was switching from Oasys to Microsoft Word95 to do layout for the documents. The second was installing a $40,000 Ethernet system with server, printers and scanners. And the third change was assigning a personal computer and e-mail address to all in-house employees. All these changes in hardware and software resulted in a large decrease of our paper volume. Because now we were transferring work between the client and us through the I-way. Furthermore, all of our office paperwork was scanned and saved on the server, and the hard copies then disposed of. In other words, we became a "paperless" office.
The next upgrade occurred with software. Our clients decided to switch to HTML. So we had a crash course in HTML and a week later we were converting a variety of translated documents to HTML. This change also affected old documents. One client had a huge volume of old documents that were created with a variety of software (Oasys for example) that they wanted to convert to HTML. As a little side-note, many of these documents were translated in an age when quality was much lower than it is today. In other words, this particular software upgrade encompassed converting documents and rewriting the English. This job was a huge undertaking that saw the in-house agency staff doing many hours of overtime. And with that "monster" project now behind us, we are preparing for another big project involving the conversion of documents to PDF format with Acrobat software. However, looking back at what was involved with all these upgrades, one thing that has not changed very much is our number of in-house staff.
As a company becomes larger, so does the bureaucratic process. As a result, making changes of any kind becomes difficult. Everything, however small, must be approved by many supervisors prior to adoption into the system. This bureaucratic process is an obstacle towards realizing a total in-house process when a change occurs. The very sought after strategy of accomplishing all work related to translation by our client is really quite difficult, if not impossible. So the manufacturer turns to the small translation agency, who plays an important role in helping the manufacturer to weather the difficulties inherent in change, because a small agency has flexibility. A small agency is able to quickly adopt a new change and become fully operational with the new system before the manufacturer. In this way, the agency gives the manufacturer a "jump start" by speeding up the process of incorporating the change into the respective department. But this symbiotic relationship works best when the agency finds the right information.
It turns out that among all the agencies that our main client deals with, we have the reputation of always trying to find new ways to do something. Our president is always looking for new information. But no matter how much information one may have, predicting the future is very difficult. For example, try to imagine what kind of equipment translators may be using two years from now. Maybe I'll be wearing a Star Trek-type headset and relaying commands through a microphone to a palm-sized hard-disk attached to my belt, and viewing both the Japanese and English documents through goggles. And the translated document may be sent to the client at 200,000 bps with laser technology via a network of satellites orbiting the earth. Sounds pretty exciting. Needless to say, JATers should prepare themselves, both mentally and financially, for the new challenges that technology will bring upon how translation is performed, and how we do business with our clients. And I think the best way to do that is by surfing the I-way, networking with JATers, and participating in the Honyaku Mailing List.
まとまったお休みがとれたら、ちょっと長い次のような本は いかがでしょうか。
宮部みゆき 「理由」 朝日新聞社 ５７３ページ、１８００円 ＩＳＢＮ４−０２−２５７２４４−２
カード破産をテーマにした前作「火車」に続く社会派ミステリー。 東京の下町の工場跡地にできた高層マンションで起きた殺人事件に かかわる人々の告白が続く。現代日本の不動産流通や裁判所の競売 制度の問題が描かれる。競売を妨害する「占有屋」というものの 存在を初めて知った。
高村薫 「レディ・ジョーカー 上・下」 毎日新聞社 上巻 ４２６ページ （しかも二段組！）、 １７００円 （今、下巻が手元にないのですが、たぶん値段もボリュームも 上と同じくらいです） ＩＳＢＮ４−６２０−１０５７９−１
「マークスの山」、「照柿」に続く、合田雄一郎警部補を主役とする
第３弾。すごく描写が細かい。硬派。ちなみに著者はＩＣＵ卒の女性。
おびの宣伝文句から
一兆円企業の社長が誘拐された
誰が、なぜ
企業社会の黙示録がいま、扉を開ける
... 人間存在の深淵を覗く、前人未到の物語が 始まる。
書評ではたしか、ドストエフスキーの「罪と罰」が引き合いに 出されていました。
Emily Shibata-Sato
By Tom Gally
* The review was originally posted on Honyaku on June 19, 1998. Thank you Tom for allowing us to reprint it here.
Recently I was fortunate to receive a review copy of a slim book that should be a standard reference for all Japanese-English translators and others involved in writing about Japan. The title is "Japan Style Sheet: The SWET Guide for Writers, Editors and Translators." The author is listed as "Society of Writers, Editors and Translators, Tokyo, Japan," an organization that is known to many Honyakkers, and some familiar names are listed in the book's acknowledgments. The book reviewed here is the 1998 edition, a revision of the 1983 version (of which I knew only by rumor).
The preface explains the book's purpose:
This guide has been compiled to assist writers, editors, and translators working on English-language publications related to Japan. It discusses problems that come up in connection with Japanese names and dates, and, most important, with the use of the Japanese language transcribed into the Latin alphabet. While it contains advice, information, and several appendices useful to translators and researchers in Japanese studies, it is mainly aimed at the needs of editors and writers without specialized knowledge of Japan or the Japanese language.
Topics discussed in this book include romanization systems and methods of indicating long vowels, apostrophes, and other aids to a proper reading of romanized Japanese words; spelling; use of hyphens; italicization; personal names and place names; capitalization; plurals; and styles for notes and other backmatter.
Although the book is directed primarily at English-speakers who understand little or no Japanese, there is much of interest for translators as well. For example, two pages are devoted to "N or M: Shinbun or Shimbun?," an issue about which--though I have written and translated several Japanese-language textbooks in which all Japanese was rendered in romaji--I have never adopted a consistent policy. Or the question of whether to write Japanese names in English with the surname first or last. I thought I knew the issues involved, but I was never aware of the hybrid approach, which uses traditional Japanese order for pre-Meiji figures and Western order for people of later periods. On both of these questions and on the other issues it covers-- macrons, the treatment of Japanese words in English, hyphenation and word division, addresses, and much more--this book takes a reasonable, nondogmatic approach. When several choices are possible, it describes the advantages and disadvantages of each so that the reader can make an informed choice.
The book is elegantly written and designed, and it is reasonably priced. More details are available at http://www.infopage.net/swet/ jss.html, including information on a special discount offer good through the end of August. The book can also be purchased from Amazon (http://www.amazon.com), Barnes & Noble (http://www.barnesandnoble.com/), Books.com (http://www.books.com/), and Borders (http://www.borders.com/). The ISBN is 1-880656-30-2.
(My only complaint is that several items in the annotated bibliography are incomplete or out of date. Only Chiezou is listed from among the big three annual references; I would have included Imidas and Gendai Yougo no Kiso Chishiki as well. Kodansha's "Japan: An Illustrated Encyclopedia" (1993) is identified as being in two volumes, but the edition distributed in Japan is in one volume. And, while the 1997 edition of Nelson's character dictionary appears, the "Japanese- English Translation Handbook" (Japan Times) and "McGraw-Hill Kagaku Gijutsu Yougo Daijiten" are listed in their old editions, even though newer editions appeared more than a year ago. (A pickier point is that this style book seems to be inconsistent on a matter of style. The authorial organization is identified "Society of Writers, Editors and Translators" and the book's subtitle on the title page and cover is "The SWET Guide for Writers, Editors and Translators"--without a series comma--while the Library of Congress data on the copyright page give the subtitle as "the SWET guide for writers, editors, and translators"--with the series comma--and the series comma is used in the text, as quoted in the preface above. Considering the obvious care with which this book was written, though, I have no doubt that this inconsistency was noticed and debated during the book's preparation.))
By Fred Uleman
The SWET _Japan Style Sheet_ is available until Sept 1 at 1,300 yen (postage included) for people in Japan only (whether they are swet members or not). (Note: This offer is _not_ available for people outside of Japan. Sorry.)
To order, send money to swet at:
Attach a copy of your proof of payment and send it with your name and address to swet
by Bill Lise
A press release from the USPTO, dated 25 June 1998, announced that full texts of 2,000,000 US patents and 800,000 trademark registrations would be available to the public free of charge and in searchable form. Services will be started as follows.
| Trademark texts | (from late 1800s) | August 1998 |
| Patent texts | (from 1976) | November 1998 |
| Patent images | (screen resolution) | by March 1999 |
It will additionally be possible to order high-resolution versions of images from the USPTO.
These services should provide a valuable source of real patent texts for patent translators, for use in studying patent style and in searching for terminology.
by Bill Lise
A recent question on the honyaku mailing list prompted me to comment that only 10% of J-E work is Japan is done by native-English-writing translators (NEWTs). This evoked questions about the basis for this belief, which caused me to sit back and review these beliefs in light of available statistics and common-sense observations of the J-E translation market.
With regard to the question of whether my beliefs about the J-E translation population in Japan are based on statistics or are visceral, the answer is both of the above, or more precisely that they are based on statistics and observations of the J-E translation market.
Unfortunately, the answers to questions about translator headcount are not something you can look up in an almanac. Fairly good common-sense estimates are possible, however, with a bit of observation coupled with available statistics. The questions raised were basically:
* Why do I think that there are "thousands" of translators servicing the J-E market in Japan?
and
* Why do I think that only about 10% of the J-E work done in Japan is done by native speakers of English?
For reasons that should shortly become apparent, the above are really one and the same issue, when you consider the issue of just how many native-English-writing translators (NEWTs) there might be in Japan, combined with reasonable estimates of the size of the J-E market that needs to be served.
My view that there are thousands of translators in Japan serving the J-E market is come from several observations, most of which are based on specific publicly available statistics and some of which are based company-specific statistics.
Some points to consider:
* Although there is a great amount of J-E work in non-export-related translation, in terms of number of pages, the largest sector by far of the J-E market in Japan is the support of exports of products and technologies with J-E translations. So I lets look at how much work this sector might produce.
* Before thinking about just how much J-E translation work the above-noted market generates, it would be useful to consider what I have referred to in the past as the translation-export ratio for that product area, as a measure of generated translation work as a percentage of the exports it is required to support. The TER varies wildly for product area. For example, it is extremely low for consumer products and extremely high for industrial products. The reasons for this are simple:
* Consumer products have huge sales but are generally simple enough to have simple manuals. Indeed, a product so complicated it requires the user to read a manual might be a non-starter.
* Industrial products tend to be more varied (lower runs of a high number of different products) and tend to be more complex than consumer products, whereas consumer products can be very repetitious (e.g., the same electronic guts in 7 models of TV set, the only differences being the screen size).
* A corroborating reality check is that I seldom hear of translators working on TV set instruction manuals.
* I know the translation budgets of certain industrial product manufacturers, and therefore know their TER. In one case--that of a medium size company doing about 20 oku in export, the TER is about 0.7 percent. Another, a manufacturer of another type of industrial product exports about 70 oku yearly and has a TER of about 2.2%. For reasons mentioned above, I suspect that the TER for consumer products would be less than 0.1%.
Taking just several sectors of just one industry, a look at the export statistics for the electronic industry (June 18 issue of Denpa Shimbun) indicates the following for FY 1995 and 1996 (Units:億円).
| 重電機器 | 民生機器 | 産業機器 | ||||
| Production | Exports | Production | Exports | Production | Exports | |
| 1995 | 36,026 | 11,839 | 24,345 | 13,133 | 107,295 | 29,442 |
| 1995 | 35,930 | 13,402 | 22,092 | 10,392 | 126,975 | 30,043 |
In passing, readers might note that industrial electronic exports far outpace consumer electronics exports from Japan. That fact, added to the much higher TER of industrial products, makes industrial products the much more attractive target for translators than consumer-product translations. I would estimate that industrial product J-E translations overwhelm consumer J-E work by a ratio of 10-to-1.
Note that the above table excludes the figures for ICs and other components. Having done a considerable amount of this work in my earlier years as a translator, I can say with confidence that components create insignificant amounts of translation, relative to finished products, since the bulk of exports are commodity chips, the specifications of which are often repetitious and can be covered in a few pages of specifications.
My educated (spelled: based on 25+ years experience and specific knowledge of the translation budgets of some companies) guess is that industrial electrical products could be expected to have a TER of at least 1.0% on average. I can also cite cases in which the translation cost is 25% of the corresponding exports for a certain product, but this situation is rare, and generally occurs only when very low quantities are involved. In no case in which I can identify the amount of money actually being spent for translation can I find a manufacturer of industrial electronics products spend less than 0.5% of their export amount on translation. I have, incidentally made a point of asking questions about translation budget. Sometimes, I didn't need to ask, because I was getting all the J-E translation work from a particular client. Remember, the above figures do not include ICs and other components, which would have a very low TER. Remember, also, that this does not include such peripheral items as sales support. An example I can cite from my everyday work is a company that regularly orders 200,000 yen per month of J-E translation just to do OHP slides and speeches to support their licensing (i.e., export of technology) programs with overseas firms.
If 1.0% is a good TER for industrial products, based on a 250-working-day year, this would be approximately 120 million end-user billed yen of translation per day to support this product group. How many translators do we think can do this amount of billing? Does the average translator do 100,000 yen of end-user billable work a day? I seriously doubt it. I suspect that a more reasonable figure would be 50,000 yen of billable work (not necessarily billed that way by the translator, course, if the translator is in-house or working through an agency). Using that figure, there would need to be 2400 translators chugging away to support exports of industrial electronics products. We are already into the "thousands," without considering myriad other product areas that generate translation work, and without considering non-product-related J-E translation.
With knowledge of what a specific manufacturer makes, the export amounts for the company, and knowledge of the level of new product development from that company, it is not that difficult to estimate the amount of translation that company will need for instruction manuals and the like to support exports. This exercise can be carried out by anybody with some product knowledge, a willingness to keep an eye on new product development, and a copy of any of several company guides that are available (e.g.,会社情報 and四季報). For example, seeing a company come out with sophisticated vibration analysis system, I can pretty well tell the size of the instruction manual that is going to be required to export that product. People who translate the huge volume of telephone switching documentation required by those giant computer manufacturers in Kawasaki will be able to predict the mountains of translations from those firms. Those with work connections to the auto industry should be able to provide insight into the volume of work from that sector.
Moving away from translation that is directly related to product exports, another easily identifiable and quantifiable area is patent translation. The number patents granted by the USPTO to Japanese entities and the average length of patents means that 1 million words of patent translation need be produced each day to support filings in the US. While I suspect that not many patent translators work at the feverish pace that I like to maintain, let's say that the average patent translator does 3000 words per day. That would mean 333 patent translators. Naturally, the high profitability of patent translation for patent offices here means that a lot of this is done in-house (so as to make it even more profitable), the result being that many of these translators remain invisible.
With regard to the issue of the number of NEWTs in Japan, my feeling after being involved with JAT for 13-plus years is that the net number (weighted to accommodate the effect of people doing things other than translation) is not more than triple the Japan-based NEWT membership of JAT. Couple that with my estimate (fairly conservative, I believe) of between 7000 and 10000 J-E translators (in-house and outside) in Japan, and the 10% NEWT figure in Japan starts to sound real. I don't think it is reasonable to ask someone to believe that there are, for example, 700 "net" NEWTs in Japan. I think that 7000 non-NEWT J-E translators in Japan, for reasons I have discussed, is not at all an unreasonable number.
After swimming for years in the sea of the Honyaku mailing list, one could get a distorted view of J-E translators in Japan. I would advise against the approach of assuming that the active Japan-based portion of Honyaku members is typical of J-E translators working in Japan. The bulk of the J-E work in Japan (i.e., the vast majority of product-related translation) is more likely done by translators who would not feel comfortable in the Honyaku environment, with its de facto "national" language of English. The Japan-based Honyaku J-E translators are probably better characterized as a special subset of the J-E translator population in Japan. The J-E translation market is a jungle, and Honyaku is just one corner of that jungle where some translators hang out.
国語の中学入試問題です。 みなさん、できますか？ （幻冬舎文庫、日能研企画編集 「シカクいアタマをマルくする」 国語編より）
１スンビョウを ２キソうのが マスコミの ３セキム とはいえ、 宇宙人の地球 ４ライホウ というような ５ジンシン を惑わす ６ホウドウ については、これをいちはやく社会に ７テイキョウ した この ８キシャ の ９ケンシキ を １０ウタガわざるを得ない。
３つともちがう場合はバツ、１つだけちがう場合は、そのちがう 漢字を書きなさい。 （青山学院中）
Emily Shibata-Sato
by Bill Lise
In an effort to solve the problem of incomprehensible katakana usage, the Ministry of Health declared some months ago that " 国民のご理解を避けるため、公文書や報告書作成には出来る限り日本 語表記に努める." Unbeknownst to the Ministry, it was announcing to the world that it had committed errors in the understanding of both language and the understanding of the dynamics of language as it is really used by the people of Japan.
Although they might just have been sloppy in the terminology they used, surely they realize that katakana is part of the writing system of Japanese (日本語表記) and that myriad Japanese words borrowed from foreign languages are normally written in katakana and honored by dictionary entries which explain same to the unknowing.
Leaving aside the Ministry's lack of sophistication and knowledge of the world outside of Kasumigaseki, a professor of linguistics (M. Jinnai at 関西学院大学) has done a study that indicates that local governments in Japan are also making efforts to purge incomprehensible katakana, but lack a common standard for just what is and is not incomprehensible (読売夕刊 1998/7/4).
The study indicated that many local governments were themselves not able to provide Japanese-language equivalents to many katakana and not able to provide explanations which they said should be used with the terms. The article presented the following table of terms and their meanings.
| カタカナ語 | 意味 |
| アクセス | 交通手段、経路 |
| アメニティ | 快適性 |
| エリア | 区域、地域 |
| ガイドライン | 指針、指標 |
| コンセプト | 理念、考え方 |
| コンセンサス | 意見の一致 |
| シーリング | 予算要求枠 |
| ニーズ | 要求、需要 |
| ファジー | あいまい |
| フレーム | 枠、骨組み |
| シミュレーション | 模擬実験 |
| ポテンシャル | 潜在能力 |
| マンパワー | 人材、労働力 |
| マスタープラン | 基本計画 |
| マニュアル | 手引書 |
| ノーマライゼーション | 標準化 |
Of the 17 terms listed, Aomori Prefecture cited 14 which required explanations. The three areas listed, Aomori, Saitama, Toyama, and Tottori, exhibited a wide variance in their approach to this problem.
One issue not apparently dealt with is that of context, an important one since the above table points to some usages by government offices which are at odds with usages in other contexts.
For example, the term シミュレーション (J has gained some currency with the meaning of "alternate history," a currently popular fiction genre which involves nothing of the sort of thing implied by the meaning given. When the initial hype of the Internet hit Japan, アクセス (J suddenly became a buzzword, but the associations of that word are a bit distant from what is meant when the term is used by politicians wanting to spend money to build roads.
This translator's personal view is that the use of katakana to refer to concepts that already have usable, used, and commonly understood Japanese-grown expressions ranks with the propensity that Shigeo Nagashima has for sprinkling his comments with foreign expressions (マ、ひとつのメークドラマです ネ）. Concepts which are indeed new (and there are remarkably few) might certainly be expressed in katakana. If that works, I see no reason to make efforts (i.e., spend tax money) to find Japanese-language equivalents.
Going from the confusing to the more confusing, I can recall asking directions to somewhere in Shibuya about a year ago. The person I stopped told me to take a turn at the sign for The 職安 . Look and look as I might for the sign, I came up empty--until I asked again. I was standing within view of the sign, it turned out. The sign had a large title on it reading ハローワーク, with a small note in the corner explaining to the unknowing that this was indeed the 職安. I reached my destination, and with another useless piece of information about the onslaught of katakana under my belt.