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A JATWeb Interview with Lee Seaman and Zachary Braverman
JATWeb: Tell us about yourselves -- how you got interested in Japanese, how long you've been translating, what you like and don't like about the work.
Lee: My best friend at college decided to go to Waseda University for a year, and my parents told me I couldn't go. So of course I had to. That was in 1968, and it was really hard to find Japanese language courses outside a few major universities in the States, so I couldn't continue after I went home. But when my husband and I came back to teach English in 1971, I was able to go to Japanese school part-time. I started translating in Japan around 1978, and started doing full-time medical translation in 1985.
Zachary: When I went to high school, they were offering Japanese as an elective language. It sounded fun, so I took it, a rash act I almost immediately regretted, as it was my hardest course for most of high school. It was not until I graduated high school and went to college, though, and made a few trips to Japan, including a year abroad in Kyoto, that I ever considered it would become a permanent part of my life. I've been translating for 5 years; I got my start in Tokyo as I was auditing some graduate school classes.
Translating suits my personality in lots of ways. I've always enjoyed writing and been good at it, and I love the Japanese language. I dislike office environments and working with others. I work best when there is no one else around and I can relax in my own home, often late at night when everyone else is asleep. I view translating as a craft, similar to carpentry or brick-laying. I enjoy the process of picking words and arranging them into pleasing and functional forms.
Lee: I like almost everything about my work -- the freedom to set my own schedule, the intellectual stimulation, the interaction with other translators, and the ability to craft a high-quality final product. I also teach a Japanese martial art, and that involves a lot of interpersonal work. Translation is a good counterbalance, because it's just me and the text, and I can make enough money from translation to support my teaching.
The one thing I don't like about translation is illegible source texts. I used to get angry about third-generation faxes, and recently I've added blurry PDF files to that. Usually I say no to illegible work, but sometimes it's a good customer and I can't.
JATWeb: Zachary, you do quite a bit of translation work in other fields, including some lucrative games translations. What got you interested in medical translation?
Zachary: My wife is a medical student, so there are always medical books around the house. She also often tells me about something interesting she learned that day. In this way the whole field began to seep into my consciousness, and I became more and more interested in it. At the same time, I began to realize that not having a specialty was a real liability for me in terms of creating a stable income at the level I wanted. I had been a "general" translator for about four years (also doing lots of games), and intended to continue as such, but I came to the conclusion that the two skills of understanding Japanese and writing well in English just weren't enough, at least in my case.
Medical translation is incredibly difficult, at least for me as a beginner, but it's also more satisfying. Game translation is fun, but too much of it can turn your brain to mush, and I feel like I'm contributing to a culture I don't always like very much. In the same way, translating marketing-related documents often leaves a bad taste in my mouth. With medical documents, I know that I am contributing in a small but concrete way to something worthwhile, and that's important for me. Finally, it's a challenge. It's like learning a whole other language, and this is something I know I enjoy.
JATWeb: Lee, you've been doing medical translation for quite a while. What made you decide to start specializing?
Lee: When I first started translating, I took everything anybody asked me to do. Caterpillar tractors components, computer software (that was terrible), electronic equipment, cardboard box-folding machinery. But I had some undergraduate background in chemistry, so I found that chemistry patents were more fun than any of the other work. Then someone sent me a fairly simple pharmaceutical job, mostly chemistry, and I was able to do it. About that time I was gradually building up my reference library, and I realized that I had to either specialize or build another room on the house to hold the reference books. So I started telling people that I specialized in chemical, medical, and pharmaceutical work, and gradually I stopped taking other subjects. In the last several years, there has been so much pharmaceutical work that I have been able to turn down most of the chemistry that comes by, too.
I would probably make more money if I focused on chemical patents, but I get a lot of joy out of medical and pharmaceutical translation. There are some fascinating developments in new drug design, and recently I've gotten interested in the work being done to model human disease in transgenic laboratory animals.
JATWeb: What are your top five "must-have" references for medical translators?
Lee: Well, I started buying reference materials in 1985, and I'm still at it. I average at least US $500 per year on references and periodicals. But there are just a few that I keep on top of my desk where I can get at them all the time.
In addition to a good general dictionary (I use Kenkyusha's New Japanese-English Dictionary) and a good kanji dictionary (I use Nelson's; the author's son Richard took and passed the Japanese National Medical Examinations, and perhaps as a result the dictionary has a surprisingly high percentage of medical-related terms), I recommend the Interpress Dictionary of Biology and Medical Science (Y28,840, ISBN 4-87198-206-8), which is really a glossary rather than a dictionary. It contains a lot of errors, but it has so many listings that even when it is wrong, it has often provided me with a starting point.
To make sure what I find in the Interpress (and other Japanese-English dictionaries) is actually English, I have a good general English-English medical dictionary (Dorland's -- about US$50, ISBN 0-7216-2859-1 -- or Stedman's, both on CD-ROM if you prefer that format).
If you can afford them I recommend the Dictionary of Chemistry and Chemical Technology (Japanese-English-Chinese, published in Beijing, about US$300 when I bought it, ISBN 0-444-873716), the current version of Drugs in Japan (Y22,000, ISBN 4-8407-2321-4), and Saishin Igaku Daijiten, second edition (much more reliable than the Interpress, but less comprehensive, Y13,000, ISBN 4-263-20825-0). If you can't afford all three of those, Medical Abbreviations (about US$25, ISBN 0-931431-10-7, available directly from the author at www.neilmdavis.com), The Merck Manual (I don't have the price handy but it's under US$50, ISBN 0911910-16-6), and/or the Physician's Desk Reference (about US$90, ISBN 1-56363-375-2) are quite helpful. The Merck Manual has the additional advantage of being extremely well-written.
Zachary: I have only just begun building my medical translation bookshelf, but here are some URL's that have been invaluable to me:
Asako Mizuno's searchable databases let you find the English quickly for 20,000 or so chemicals. This helps a lot for drug studies, etc.
The Online Life Sciences Dictionary is a good E/J and J/E dictionary of biomedical terms. For most of the words in the database, it provides a link to a concordance for that word that shows many examples of how it is actually used the journal articles in the PubMed database.
Eijiro is great as a measure of last resort; it never ceases to surprise me with some incredibly obscure terms.
The best collection of acronyms I've found.
Access to the massive searchable Medline database of journal articles and some medical dictionaries.
JATWeb: What advice do you have for people who are just starting out in medical translation?
Zachary: Be persistent and don't be too discouraged when faced with a page full of terms you don't understand. In the beginning, plan on spending three times as much time as you do for the same volume of general work. Find a way to get feedback. Start studying some basic medical principles. Read JAMA or another journal periodically to get a handle on the language. Marry a doctor. :)
Lee: If you have the opportunity, it can also be helpful to edit some other medical translations. When you're editing a good translation it will build up your expertise, and when you're editing a bad one it will build your confidence.
Just be sure and schedule enough time, and don't put pressure on yourself to make a lot of money right away. I considered my first year as graduate school that I didn't have to pay for. That was a helpful perspective on the days when I earned about US$0.50/hour.
JATWeb: How did you get a start in the specialty, since you need experience and many specialized dictionaries to do a good job, neither of which you have in the beginning?
Zachary: While continuing other forms of translation, slowly find agencies that will give you medical work. Let them know that your translation might require extra checking; therefore don't expect and don't charge what an experienced and better-qualified translator could get for the same document.
Lee: I agree, except that in the United States I have found it isn't a good idea to tell agencies or end-users that my work might require extra checking, because they probably have no one in-house who reads Japanese, and so they can't do any checking themselves.
Instead, I told people that I was just starting to specialize in medical translation, and I would have to look at the job before I would know if it was an area I could do within their time limits. Then I would turn down the jobs that were just too tough. In my experience, agencies respect that approach. If I did take a job, though, I had to make sure that I was able to finish it well and on time. That meant pulling some all-nighters when I miscalculated and took a job that was really too difficult for me.
Zachary: Get feedback both from the agency and, hopefully, from another experienced translator (in the best of all worlds, before the job is actually handed in). As far as dictionaries go, plan on spending at least $500-1000 to seed your medical library. Ask your peers for what dictionaries they recommend. Did I mention "don't give up"?