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Editor's Notes
Adam has been extremely active in JAT and is the manager of the HONYAKU website, a very valuable resource for not only E-J and J-E translators but translators and interpreters in general. Recently, in his spare time, Adam has been organizing the next IJET conference to be held in Austin, Texas, in May 1999 -- no doubt a huge job to tackle and manage. He is the alternate half of JAT's first husband- wife translating duo (see above interview with Jenny Rice).
What is your education and experience background? How did it lead to translating?
B.A., University of Texas 1984 in Asian Studies. I studied Japanese all through college, as well as other classes on Japanese art and politics. This all sounds very diligent and goal-directed, but I really just started taking Japanese in the first place because it seemed different and interesting. I stuck with it because I liked it, and after a while it just made sense to pick Asian Studies as my major, so I rounded out my Japanese education with other related classes.
At some point when I was a junior in college, I decided that I needed to do something with all this fancy book-learning, like go to Japan. I tried to get into the Monbusho's JET program, but that didn't work out, so I literally just got on a plane and went over with no plan in mind more concrete than teaching English conversation. I discovered I didn't like that at all, nor did I like a couple of other jobs I drifted through while in Tokyo, but after I had been there about a year, I decided (with considerable encouragement from my girlfriend of the time) I would try my hand at translating. I sort of posted a reverse want-ad on TWICS, and got an in-house translation job. The rest is history.
How long have you been a translator?
My first in-house job started in 1989, so about 9 years.
What was your first translation job?
It was as a translator/checker at a small agency in Tokyo. When I started out, I was just hopeless as a translator. I didn't know how much I didn't know. I was working directly under a Japanese man with very precise English, and he meticulously edited my work, answered all my stupid questions, and basically whipped me into shape to be a tolerable translator.
Do you live in Japan? (Why or why not?)
No. Why? Well, getting a visa would present some logistical problems, since I am a freelancer and can't rely on a spouse visa. Also, anywhere I live is going to be a trade-off. Certainly there are aspects of like in Japan that I miss here, but on balance, I think I am happier where I am.
How many languages are you familiar with? Do you translate into or from those languages?
Japanese is the only language I know well enough to translate (and even that is open to debate). I know a little French. I've studied a couple other languages along the way (Chinese and Hebrew) but retain absolutely nothing of them.
How did you learn Japanese? (or English or other languages that you translate into or from)?
I did study formally in college for 3.5 years. Once I arrived in Japan I learned how inadequate that education was. Living in Japan was a huge education in the language, of course. Also, as I said, my agency experience was a real learning experience in being a J-E translator, more than in Japanese in general.
What are some of the challenges you face as a translator with regards to Japanese?
Oh brother. That's tough. Most jobs have some kind of challenge. In many cases, they boil down to the following:
There are no doubt others, but those are the main categories of problems I can think of.
How do you get your clients?
Through referrals from fellow translators and through IJET. I met my three most reliable clients over the years at various IJETs.
How do you keep up with your clients in Japan?
It hasn't been much of an issue. All of my clients in Japan have e-mail, but for the most part, they fax me work and I do it. There's not a lot of interaction beyond that. When there's an urgent matter, I use the phone. When it isn't urgent, I use e-mail.
I have one client with whom I never had any interaction other than e-mail for quite a long time. They always use e-mail for sending jobs, or even send me a URL and tell me "translate that" (I wish more clients were like this). At one point they sent me a job while I was visiting Japan--this was interesting, since they didn't know I was there. I accepted the job and suggested we finally meet face-to-face. We did, and it was a nice meeting.
One interesting aside: a few years ago, when Jenny and I were on one of our periodic trips to Tokyo we set up three clients with Internet accounts on GOL, more for our own convenience than anything else. We had been using various semi-satisfactory ways of returning files to them until then. They all basically knew that they ought to get Internet accounts, but just hadn't gotten around to it. We did the actual setting-up work for them.
What are your fields of specialization? Why? How do you keep up with new developments?
A lot of my work has to do with computers or telecoms in some capacity. I am inherently interested in these topics, and read up on them online pretty often. Some of my work has to do with marketing, and I find that the best way to educate myself for that is to read the paper and to shop with a critical eye for how business works.
Is your translation style "loose" or "literal"?
Usually it is pretty loose. The better I understand something, the looser it gets. I rarely get into the extensive restructuring of texts that I have seen a few translators do--I have respect for their integrity, but don't feel comfortable, say, re-arranging chapters in a book.
Do you read other books or magazines written in the source language in our spare time?
Not as much as I ought to--just a little bit.
What are some of your favourite reference materials? (What's on your bookshelf within easy reach right now?)
I've been using Unidict (an electronic J<>E and kanji dictionary--it's a commercial version of Edict) a lot lately, and it is very handy. Not perfect, but a good start. Great for names and unknown kanji compounds.
I keep Nelson's and Kenkyusha's on my desk most of the time. I also like using Kodansha's Nihongo Daijiten. One dictionary I recommend very highly is Shogakkan's "Saishin Nichibei Hyougen Jiten." This is a thematically-organized dictionary, with a lot of useful reference information--the Section 1 companies from the TSE, org charts for the Japanese government ministries, etc.
What is the singular (or more if you can think of any!) most important piece of advice you can give to people just starting out in translation?
Make sure you have a personality that is suited to translating. I think this means an attention to detail, intellectual curiosity, a love of language, the ability to concentrate on a single document for a long time, without much human interaction.
What do you think are the most important elements or skills necessary in translation? Will these change in 5 or 10 years?
The web has certainly changed the way I think about reference sources--being able to take advantage of the web is an important skill.
Also, having a big corpus of my own work in electronic form, where I can quickly search out the way I handled a term in the past is an important evolution in the way people translate. The tools to do this are only going to get better. So having the ability to take maximum advantage of one's own work history will become more important.
Japan's economy may be going into a long-term decline, and may not be such a great source of work (or high-paying work, anyhow) in the future. This will mean either diversifying into different languages or different services in order to keep making money.
Are you still going to be translating 5 or 10 years from now? Do you think the profession will change and how?
I think I half-answered this above. I hope I'll still be translating in 10 or even 20 years, because I enjoy doing it.
How much time per day do you spend translating (and editing and related activities) versus doing administrative work, clients relations, and other "running-the-business" type of activities?
I spend as little time as possible on "running-the-business" activities. I spend about 2 minutes per job on invoicing and actually sending the job. Client relations are practically a non-issue, since my clients and I have a good working relationship and understand each other pretty well. I don't do as much business cultivation as I ought to, but then again, I've never had much success with that in the past.
Please describe your work area.
My office, which I share with my wife Jenny, is a bedroom in our house. It is about 14' square. It's a very convenient setup. The room has its own door to the outside and has windows on two other walls, so it gets good light and good ventilation. We have two big bookcases and two big desks on opposite sides of the room. Our computers and printer are all on a network, and the network hub runs to a neighbor's ISDN router, which is always logged on. Having a permanent connection is an amazing convenience--you don't realize how nice it is until you go on a trip or something, and actually have to dial into an ISP to get your e-mail or check the weather forecast.
My desk is big--60" by 30". It is cluttered with an inbox, my computer, my phone, bills, dictionaries, papers I haven't gotten around to filing or trashing yet, and other random bits of junk. It is my dream to make a wraparound desk so that I can be ensconced in reference materials.
What do you like about translating?
I like the mental challenge. Well, I like it except when it is *really* challenging me. Then I hate it. I like the freedom of being a freelancer. I like knowing that I earn every penny I get. I like the community of translators I associate with.
I like those rare occasions when I produce a document that really feels like a quality piece of craftsmanship. I like it when I whip out a 500 word newspaper article translation and know it is dead-on with correct industry jargon and tight wording, and then I can go to lunch.
What do you dislike about translating?
I dislike it when the work dries up. I dislike it when the client makes unreasonable demands. I really dislike it when the client of the client of the client has made an unreasonable demand, and that just trickles down to me, and I can't really complain to the person responsible for creating the problem because he is three levels higher than me in the job-flow hierarchy. I dislike it when circumstances prevent me from doing a good job. I dislike it when I find myself in over my head.
What was your most interesting or unique translation job?
I've had a few I thought were pretty neat. I translated a journal article about CAD software for making prosthetic limbs. This covered a lot of disciplines--medicine, computing, and machining.