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The Shizuoka International Translation Competition is a literary translation contest aimed at aspiring Japanese translators. Since I was the Grand Prize winner of the 3rd competition, I have been asked to tell a bit about the contest and my experiences as a contestant.
The competition began in 1995 and is run by the Shizuoka Prefectural government. It is currently in its fifth iteration (to allow time for judging, the competition is held once every two years). Each time the competition is held, submissions are accepted in English and in one other language. Past languages have included French, Chinese, German and Korean, with the current language being Russian. The contest materials consist of three short stories and three pieces of criticism, and the entrants choose one piece from each category to translate. The selection of the pieces and the final judging of the translations is done by a panel of judges, headed by Donald Keene. Contest entrants must be people who have never had a literary translation published, although commercial translators are free to enter.
The two Grand Prize winners (one for each language) are given cash prizes of 1,000,000 yen, plus scholarships for one year's study at a university in Shizuoka Prefecture, if they should choose to accept it. Four Distinguished Translation Award winners (two for each language) are given 300,000 yen apiece, and four Distinctive Merit Award winners (two for each language) are given 100,000 yen apiece. The year I won, there were apparently 103 entrants in English and 45 in Chinese. At first glance, this may not seem like a lot, but when you consider the length and difficulty of the contest materials, and how much of an investment of time and energy it is to enter the contest, it's actually pretty impressive. You can visit the contest website for more general information about the competition.Before I tell you about my experiences as an entrant, I must make a confession. I actually entered the competition twice. The first time was in the contest's first year (1996) and I failed miserably. I don't think I even made it past the first stage of the judging. I was fresh out of college and a first-year participant in the JET program at the time, and had been given the contest materials by a former college Japanese teacher. I think the main reason I failed was because I lacked sufficient experience with Japanese. While I had always done well in Japanese class and had done a fair amount of reading in Japanese, I just didn't have enough exposure to the language to be able to translate well. The piece of literary criticism was particularly difficult, as it dealt with many theoretical concepts that I might not have fully understood in English at the time.
I finished up my three years in Japan as a JET and then returned to the US to begin a Master's program in Japanese literature. In my final semester in grad school, one of my professors suggested that I try entering the competition, not knowing that I had already tried once. Some of the contest materials were similar to things that I had been studying, and he thought that it would be a good project for me. Although I was a bit reluctant at first (I knew how much work it would require) I decided to enter. I really didn't expect to win (especially given my past performance) but I figured that it would be a valuable experience in any case.
And so I spent my last few months in grad school working on my contest entries. I chose what appeared to be two of the more difficult pieces: "Momotaro no Tanjo" by Yanagita Kunio, and "Shintoku-maru" by Orikuchi Shinobu. As I mentioned above, I had studied similar things in grad school, and I knew that Orikuchi was a sort of disciple of Yanagita, which made the two pieces seem to go together despite their wildly differing subject matter. And I must admit that I thought choosing the more difficult pieces might give me an advantage in the competition.
I had always enjoyed translating as a part of my Japanese study, but I had never done anything as long or as difficult as the contest pieces. It was a challenge, but an enjoyable one, for the most part. All together, the translation probably took me four months to complete, although I had started preparations earlier. I spent many long hours with my PowerBook, my copy of the Kojien, and my electronic dictionaries, trying to decipher the contest materials. Both were written in prewar Japanese, but luckily I had read a fair amount of literature from this period, so that wasn't too much of a problem. However, the short story "Shintoku-maru" required knowledge of Buddhism and Japanese history, and many parts of it seemed (to me anyway) to be very ambiguous—in some cases it was hard to tell who was speaking, or even if some lines were intended as dialog or narration. "Momotaro no Tanjo" was a lecture on the origins of the Momotaro legend, and contained references to dozens of Japanese folktales—most of which I had never heard of. This, combined with Yanagita's writing style and his way of presenting his argument, made it very difficult for me to even comprehend the piece at first. Only by painstakingly researching all of the tales he mentioned and by doing other background research was I able to finally get a grasp on his overall point.
I have mixed feeling about my translations. Although I am certainly proud to have won the contest, I'm not sure I can say that my translations were markedly better than those of the other winners. I also don't think that they are particularly satisfying to read in English, although I did my best to make them accessible to the non-specialist (which is really the point of translation in the first place). Although I don't generally like to use footnotes, I had to insert many of them to explain the references in "Momotaro no Tanjo" since without some background knowledge Yanagita's points would be completely unintelligible. But even so, I don't think that they are very approachable texts. Admittedly, this is largely due to the nature of the original pieces. Even most Japanese people today would not be able to casually read either piece, and this problem is compounded when the audience knows little or nothing about Japanese history, mythology, and literature.
I was very pleased and surprised when I was notified that I had won. My Japanese had improved a great deal while I was on the JET Program (just being in Japan was really a big help in this regard). It exposed me to Japanese as it is used in real life, and greatly broadened my understanding of the spoken language. This, combined with my studies in grad school, made all the difference compared to my first attempt at entering the competition.
I've been very impressed with how the competition officials have treated the winners. The Grand Prize winner and the two Distinguished Translation Award winners for each language are invited to Shizuoka for the prize ceremony, and are given a site-seeing tour of the area. I also decided to accept my one-year scholarship prize and was treated very well when I went to Shizuoka to study in the summer of 2002. All of the past Grand Prize winners were also invited back to Shizuoka for the awards ceremony of the 4th competition, and to participate in the creation of the Shizuoka International Translators Network. The top winners of each competition are inducted into the network, which is to serve as a liaison between publishing companies and translators.
The competition's self-proclaimed goals are "introducing outstanding works of Japanese literature to foreign audiences and promoting international understanding." They have also expressed a desire to contribute to the elimination of the "trade imbalance" that exists between the number of books Japan imports (translated into Japanese) and the number of books it exports (translated into foreign languages).
These are certainly worthwhile goals, but I'm afraid that they will be difficult to achieve. The biggest problem is simply the fact that the market for translated Japanese literature (particularly "serious" literature) is rather small. And the number of people who might want to read esoteric works like those I translated is very small indeed. I can really only speak as an American, but it seems that most people have little interest in reading any literature in translation. This means that in many cases publishing translations of Japanese literature is simply not profitable. And translation is given precious little respect these days even in academia; publishing literary translations does little or nothing to advance a university professor's career. It's not surprising that relatively few translations are published under these conditions.
That is not to say that there is no hope. I personally believe that there are many people in America and elsewhere who would be interested in Japanese literature if only they were exposed to it. The current popularity of anime and manga demonstrates that many people are open to things that might have once been dismissed as "too Japanese." I think that this interest in Japan might be used as a bridge to help open people up to the world of Japanese literature as well. I also hope that non-traditional means of publishing (ebooks, or print-on-demand books) will make it possible for more authors to be published in translation.
Of course, there are things that must change in Japan as well. It has long been thought that only "important" works of literature should be translated, but that is precisely the kind of literature that is the hardest to approach and that has the smallest potential audience. Why not translate more popular fiction? Japanese detective stories, science fiction, horror, and other genres could be quite popular outside of Japan, but precious little has been translated.
The competition isn't going to change any of these things on its own. But by helping to increase awareness of translation and of Japanese literature, and by encouraging people to try translating literature, they hope to help create a new generation of translators who will work on these issues. I personally have become a full-time Japanese translator since winning the competition, and I don't know if I would have thought to take that leap without the encouragement that the competition gave me. I do mostly commercial translation related to video games, computers, and consumer electronics, but I did recently finish a privately funded translation of a novel, and I hope to do more literary translation in the future. I hope that the competition will have continued success in the future, and I encourage anyone interested in literary translation to enter.