|
|
Let's start with talking about your background. I imagine you didn't start your career as a translator and that there was a time when you didn't live in Japan. What brought you to Japan and what started you in the translation profession?
This goes back to 1962 or 1963 when I was an English major at the University of Michigan looking for something to do after graduation. At the time there were three choices: you could go to graduate school, you could get drafted, or you could get a job and get drafted. Which left me one choice--I wasn't real anxious to get drafted. I ended up looking at graduate schools. I did not want to go to Europe, which impressed me as middle-aged United States. I was not interested in Nepal or Tibet or becoming a mystic in India. Japan was an interesting half way. It was different without being radically different.
So at that time you had no particular experience with Japan nor had you studied Japanese.
No. And because of that, in my senior year at Michigan, I took the graduate course that eventually became Twelve Doors to Japan, which had a little bit about many different things--two weeks of politics, two weeks of history, two weeks of this, and two weeks of that. I then got admitted to International Christian University and just came to Japan. I did not have any Japanese language ability when I came. I figured if I studied it in Ann Arbor I would end up getting it wrong, I would learn mistakes, I would be reinforcing the wrong things. I'd come here and learn it the way it was supposed to be learned in the language. I took intensive Japanese at ICU and found it a very rigid and disagreeable course. I did very badly. They eventually pretended that I graduated from that course just because they wanted to get rid of me. I spent some time at the graduate school there until I was twenty-six and also until the riot police put a fence up around the school.
How did you really learn Japanese?
I really learned Japanese by using it. When my wife and I got married, I was still in the process of learning Japanese. I found that before we got married the teachers at ICU were speaking very fast. After we got married, the teachers at ICU were speaking very slow. I learned it by using it. I think I learned it despite ICU.
Does that also apply to kanji? Did you basically learn kanji by reading?
It was just having to know it. ICU provided basic training, they provided some of the fundamentals, but they did it in such a way that I'm not sure how much of it stuck. I consider that they provided a framework, and I filled in all the blank spaces--some of the blank spaces. But it was basically learning it by doing it.
Was there a methodology you used?
No. What comes up is what I have to know. If something comes up once every ten years, maybe I don't have to remember that. If it comes up every day, I should remember it. So there are still vast gaps in what I know. What doesn't come up, I don't know.
What brought you to translation? Did you begin heading in that direction immediately after ICU?
Even when I was at ICU, I was teaching English and hating it. I got a job teaching English at Miki Takeo's offices to two of his private secretaries who wanted to learn English. They told Kunihiro, who was also an advisor to Miki, about me. This was just when Simul was getting started--I think it was the time of the first Shimoda conference or something. Kunihiro sent me a paper and said, "Would you like to translate it? These people say you have a modicum of Japanese." And so my wife and I struggled through it and managed to get it done. We sent it in. Apparently it was acceptable--I wouldn't say good, but it was usable--because there was more.
So that was the first translation you were paid for.
Right, and I realized this stuff is interesting and these people are going to pay me to read it and to make sure I understand it. That's when I decided I wanted to be a translator. Through Kunihiro I was introduced to Simul and I spent seven or eight years there and then went free-lance and formed my own company.
How long have you been translating in total?
About 25 years.
What sorts of translations do you do? Are there fields you specialize in?
The main things I do are now governmental papers and texts--international economics, politics, this sort of thing. I also do some work in quality control and productivity, but my main field is economics and politics.
Has that been fairly constant for the last ten years or so?
Yes, for more than that.
And I take it that you have a personal interest in these fields.
That's why I do it. You should not do things you're not interested in. If you're not interested in them, you're not going to read in the field in your free time and you're not going to get good at it.
How did you go about developing expertise in these fields and what do you do to maintain your expertise?
When I was at Simul I did anything that came down the pike. I was in-house and I would do the paper and pulp industry one week and the steel industry the next week. I was like being an intern at Belleview Hospital working the emergency room. Things come in, you patch them up, and send them out. Some of them die, some of them get better, but that's the way you learn. But my interest is politics. When I went free-lance, I got a job working with one of the ministries. This was through an introduction. I've been real lucky. People have been helpful all along. So, I had this introduction, and I've been working for this ministry ever since. I'm not at the ministry, I don't go do down there, except once every two or three months just to show my face. As a result of this connection, other people in related places have asked me to do things.
Since you free-lance, I take it that all your clients are direct clients and that you don't do work for agencies.
Yes.
In that context, would you have any comments about client relations in general?
It's something I do not give a whole lot of thought to. I do not do sales. The clients who have come to me have come word of mouth. The only thing I would say about client relations is do a good job. If you do a good job, you'll have good client relations. And doing a good job involves being conscientious not only about what you've done but about considering what they want, considering their schedule needs, even, at times, their terminology preferences. This may involve looking at their comments and what they call corrections and then saying, "Yes, I see what you mean, I know what you want to do, here's how we can do it in real English." After all, the client is important. The client is the one who has the final say on it, which means being conscientious also about the client's feelings. There are times when I've told clients that I don't need this job and that they can take it somewhere else. But, that's because I'd rather say that than do a bad job. You don't want to do a bad job, but you also don't want to intentionally aggravate, alienate, or abuse the client. It's a political thing. What kind of compromises can you find that you can live with and that the client will be satisfied with? But the main thing is doing a good job, being interested in the field, asking smart questions. My clients know that if they really need something by tomorrow morning, they can tell me that they need it by tomorrow morning, and that, if it's not very long, it will get done by tomorrow morning. Treat your clients as real people and they'll treat you as real people.
Do you ever do any interpreting?
No.
Why is that?
Aside from the fact that I don't like to put on a necktie and go somewhere, I'm very intimidated by the idea of interpretation. My reflexes are not that good. I would rather have time to ponder and to think about what the author really wants to say and how can I say it. I've never done interpretation. It impresses me as a different field that I've never wanted to get into.
As a translator I can spend a long time on a short passage if I have to. I can go and look in books, I can read, and I can think about it while I'm having dinner, and I can hope that I can get it right. But as an interpreter, you don't have that luxury.
Describe your average work day for me. How many pages would you translate in a day, for instance?
My average work day starts about 9:30 a.m. or 10:00 a.m.--whenever I get into the office. I have an office outside of my home on purpose. There are two reasons for this. One is so I can go home, and the other is, it's very good for client relations. Clients can bring things over and there's no a cat underfoot. It looks professional. The office rent pays for itself just in terms of what you can charge. I get here and start working and work until maybe 7:00 p.m. or 8:00 p.m. and then go home. And unless I'm very very busy, I do not take things home. Even when I do, it would be just to proofread. If I'm going to take it home there's no reason to have an office outside the house. I translate 5 to 10 pages a day on the average for the year. When I'm rushed and it's work I understand, which means the sort of thing I do all the time, I can probably to 15 or 20 pages if I need to.
What are the steps you go through to arrive at a finished product? What lets you say this is now finished and I can deliver it to the client?
You mean besides the deadline?
Yes, besides the deadline.
I work on a somewhat unusual basis. I know there are people who dictate their translations, and there are people who don't talk about tape recorders at all. Because my hearing is probably better than my reading, I have somebody read the things on tape and then I listen and read while I type. This is helpful because I get intonation, and it's helpful because I don't skip paragraphs. When a paragraph goes real slow, there's the temptation to think I've finished the whole page. It feels that way. With the tape I can't do that. If there are proper nouns or other things that are going to have to be checked, I may well put them in the text in Japanese and check them and change them later. If I have the luxury to do this, I'll let the translation sit for awhile, I'll print it out, I'll copy read the hardcopy--not on the screen but as hardcopy--I'll change sentence structure, I'll change wording, I'll do a little fiddling with it. Then I'll input the changes, and then it's basically finished. I may look at it again but it's basically there.
What kind of reference materials do you use?
I do not use dictionaries very much. I get a lot of materials from my clients. I'm probably one of the few translators that has the SII reports, just because these things come up. I have a lot of proper nouns on a database. I use the phone a lot.
I recall that previously in relation to this you recommended Kodansha's Jouhongen as an indispensable reference.
Yes. It's valuable. If you have a question, you ask somebody who knows. Who's going to know? The people that it's about. The client. The people that wrote the thing. Also, I do a lot of general reading that's obviously in my field of interest. So when something comes up, I basically know what it means. I keep books, I keep papers--your normal reference material--but with a very low priority on dictionaries. That's another nice thing about working in fields you have chosen. You don't need the dictionaries that much. You already know this stuff.
What do you think of machine translation? What possibilities does it have for the future? Will it have any impact on the translation profession?
It may. Not because it's machine translation but because it's machine screening. It will enable people to go through lots and lots of material and maybe find some key words, and say, yes, I want this translated or, no, I don't need that translated. Over the next ten or twenty years, that's about all it's going to do. I know there are lots of claims, but it's something that's not a threat to my livelihood. Even if it gets good, it's going to be at the same level as the 800 numbers. If you want to ask about your bill, push 0, if you want to place an order, push 2. Machine translation will be able to do that voice to voice. If you want to place an order, say please. If you want to ask about your bill, say ouch. But that's about it. The sort of stuff I do has too much nonverbal in it. It's not that cut and dried. I would like to see JAT have a machine translation subcommittee or something that would follow the field and report on it from time to time. There has recently been a lot of controversy over machine translation in the United States in a publication called Translation News (which is put out in New York) about the long article that appeared in Byte about machine translation. Even the people that are the hottest about machine translation are saying that, no, it's not going to be translation for the foreseeable future. It can do dummy, rote things, but that's the extent of it. It's not translation.
Do you have examples of untranslatable expressions or things that you wrestle with in your work? Where does the difficulty lie?
The things that are the hardest are the things that are the most culturally linked.
What strategies do you use to deal with such difficulties?
It depends on the client. There are some clients that do not allow me to take very many liberties. Hey, I thought you weren't going to ask any hard questions. If I'm allowed to take the liberties, and if I can find an equivalent in English, I'll use the equivalent. I do have nongovernment clients that will let me take great liberties with the material as long as it works the same way in English as it works in Japanese. And there I will look for an English language equivalent. With other clients, the most you can do is to try to make it so it doesn't sound funny.
Perhaps this is the reason you've started the topic "SAYINGS" on TWICS [Editor's Note] to ask questions that you might have in this area.
You've got sayings, you've got cultural allusions. For example, a politician might get up and say that he's more or less in the Ieyasu mode. I understand this, you understand this. This means he's a very patient person and that he's going to wait for the nightingale to sing. But, what do you do with it in English? It's an allusion to something that English language readers don't know. In English, if you've made a reference to crossing the Rubicon--I don't know if this translates into Japanese or not, but it's a particular historical reference that people from one cultural background understand. How does it translate? Throwing the dollar across the Delaware. I don't know what you do with that. I'm not even sure what it means in English. But those things are one of the reasons I'm glad I do a lot of government stuff, because governmental Japanese is an up-in-the-air mid-Pacific style that is neither Japanese nor English. It's internationalist in style.
If you were translating things from weekly magazines, it would be harder. Governmental Japanese is less culture-bound. The things Japanese consider easy to read--comics, weekly magazines, sports newspapers, punning headlines--there's no way I'm going to translate that stuff. So, the "hard" stuff that I do, is actually the easy stuff to do.
What do you like most about the Japanese language?
I saw that question in one of the other interviews, and I was hoping you weren't going to ask it because I don't have an answer.
What do you like most about the English language? Perhaps that's equally hard to answer.
Yes, it is. They're both very different but both very serviceable languages. They do what they're supposed to do, which is obvious: otherwise they would have been changed. There are all kinds of things that you can do in Japanese that would be done very differently in English. There are ways to joke with people in Japanese, there are ways to offend people in Japanese, there are lots of things that you can do in Japanese that would have to be done very differently in English. And, of course, vice-versa. So rather than any one particular thing, I enjoy the language, I enjoy the vitality of everything that is happening here. And if you don't have the language, you're not going to get that. You're not going to be attuned to what is actually happening. You're not going to understand it. You're going to be a tourist. So rather than things I particularly like about the Japanese language, the Japanese language is my window on life in Japan.
So, one way to express this is, it's not the language itself but what the language allows you to do.
The language itself is not the attraction. The attraction is all of these things that people are writing and saying and doing in Japanese and that, if I didn't know the language, I would be completely shut out from. And the fact that it's not a Euro-American language means that the things that are happening, being said, and being thought are different in nonsuperficial ways from what I get in the Economist, Business Week, Newsweek, and the other English language stuff I see.
What do you like about the translation profession or about translation itself and what do you dislike about it?
I like the fact that, to translate something, I have to read it closer than I would otherwise have to read it. I have to actually understand it. What's he saying? Why? What does this mean, where is it coming from, where is it going? What impact is this going to have on the reader in the original? What is the person not saying? Why? If you don't understand that, you may blunder and say something the person doesn't want to say. So, as a translator, I have to read things pretty intensely. I have to really understand them. And I enjoy that. Also, as a translator, I'm able to be my own company. I don't need to work somewhere else. It's something I can do the way I want to do it. And I enjoy that.
Anything you dislike about translation?
Schedules sometimes get on my nerves. That's why I did not say I can be my own boss. I have a dozen bosses. When a client calls, that client is the boss. Which means I sometimes have to juggle schedules or talk to the client. I recently spent four hours at a client's office going over a translation. This is part of the job. And I learned something. But, still, I would rather not have done that. I don't really mind--well, I do mind, but it's not a major complaint--that clients do not understand what's happening when you do a translation. That's not a major complaint because I've probably dropped most clients who don't understand this. But, that's a problem in translation. You spend a lot of time and intellectual energy on producing a translation, and nine clients out of ten have no idea what went into it. This is frustrating. But, again, if you keep working on the translation and keep working on your clients, the translation is doable and the clients are educable.
What approach do you take to translation on a continuum from literal to loose?
Who is the client? It's not what approach I take but what approach the client takes. But, constant within that is that it has to say the same thing and it has to work the same way. It has to have the same impact, which a literal translation is very unlikely to have. I do government stuff--I do speeches, for example, that are intended to warm the audiences' heart and make everybody feel good. If I did a literal translation, it would be very choppy and awkward in English. People would stop and say what does that mean? That defeats the whole purpose. It's not there so that people will sit down and think what it means. It's there so that people will read it or hear it and say, "Good speech!" So, it has to have the same impact in English that it has in Japanese. Within that, there are ways to do this fairly literally and there are ways to do this fairly freely. And that depends on the client. But, it has to do the same work, convey the same information, convey the same feelings, evoke the same responses. Otherwise it's not equivalent.
What advice would you give to people who want to get in the translation business?
Make sure you have good reading comprehension in the source language, make sure you have good writing skills in the target language, and make sure you understand the subject. Those three are prerequisite. If you have those, then you can probably get into the field. After that, it's personal chemistry. But you have to have all three of the prerequisites. There are people who cannot write in English and who think they are Japanese-English translators; there are people who cannot understand Japanese and who think they are Japanese-English translators; there are people who translate out of their fields and way over their heads and think they are translators. None of these three groups qualifies. The three are all prerequisite. But then after that, if you do it, you express interest in what you are doing, I would assume that clients would rather have somebody who is interested in doing the translation. Spending a little time to talk with the client about the content of what you've done is one way both to solidify the relationship and to show that you understood what you did. Clients will remember this. If you can work for direct clients, with all due respect to the few good agencies that are out there, this will give you immediate feedback, it gives you real access, and it probably pays better. It's not a hard field to get into; it's a field that needs more people.
When you are doing translation, there are lots and lots of people who can help and most of them will. It's not something you have to do all by your lonely: neither the translation nor the selling of yourself. A surprising number of people will make recommendations, will help out, will do things. So, go ahead. Be a translator. Join JAT. Be part of the community.