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This talk was given at the JAT Tokyo meeting, February 2002.

About Myself

• I started studying Japanese around 1984. I came to Japan for the first time in 1985. I moved to Japan in 1992 and taught English for a year before starting an import company. That company went bust with the wild fluctuations of the yen in and around 1997, so I had to do something else. After a year of doing other things, I started translating.
• After a few months and some questionable results, I was looking for ways to improve my translation skills. Working for a company was not an option for me at the time, and I was not aware of any other opportunities for me to study translation as a native speaker of English.

About Simul

• JAT member Fred Uleman announced on the JAT list that he was going to offer a translation class that would cater to native speakers of English (NSEs). Fred was a frequent poster on the list and had a good reputation as a veteran translator. I jumped at the chance. I had been translating for a year when I took the class for the first time. The class was called Japanese to English Translation for Native Speakers of English, or J2E4NSE.
• The six-month course was offered in April and October, with classes held once a week (on Wednesday) from 6 PM to 8 PM. The cost was approximately 160,000 yen. There were 4 to 6 students per class. There were no tests or grades, and there was no certificate or degree at the end of the term.

The Class

• Classes started with a handout from the teacher. The hand out gave a list of the work to be done for that week plus general comments for the whole class about the last week's work. Students handed in their translation homework. The previous week's homework was returned to the students marked with correction by the instructor. Students were encouraged to revise and hand in their homework again, so one might actually hand in the last assignment and the corrections to the previous assignment. There was in fact a stream of paper back and forth every week. This might be easier to visualize in a list:
• Students handed in:
  1. Homework just finished
  2. Revisions of corrected homework
  3. An English-language article or section of a book on any subject
• Students received:
  1. Class handout (instructions and comments from the instructor)
  2. Corrected homework
  3. New homework assignment
  4. The readings (copies of all the English language articles brought in that day)
• After any general discussions, the conversation turned to the most recent homework assignment. Students could ask any and all questions, from "what does this mean" to "how would you translate that?" All students could join in the discussion and share their thoughts on the subject. In addition to answering most of the questions, the instructor kept the whole process under control and on track as needed.
• On occasion, when there was class time left, the instructor had the students do exercises. These exercises ranged from sight translation-reading a section of a Japanese article and translating it verbally on the spot-to translating difficult passages as a group effort.

Homework

• With the reading and the translation, there was a lot of work to do-usually 10 to 20 pages of reading a day plus new translation plus corrections of earlier translations. The rule of the class was that you decide how much you can or cannot do each week.
• The reading was basically a matter of discipline. To actually get through all the reading, I had to work at it, hard. I cut out TV and other things and read every chance I got when I wasn't sweating over the translation.
• The translations themselves were not very long. They were only a couple of thousand characters at the most. But because this was for a class and all, I sweated over each paragraph, sentence, and word. Despite my best efforts, there were always corrections. This was frustrating but also educational, in that I was forced to defend my translation choices and thus thought more about it. Sometimes a "defensible" translation has to suffice when a "good" translation isn't readily available.
• A class mailing list was established, which enabled us to discuss the readings and problems and ask questions while doing the homework.

The Benefits

• I got a lot out of the reading. Reading that much on a forced march produces different results than when reading for pleasure. For one, I became much more aware of writing styles. I also benefited from exposure to many different subjects. Collecting articles from different people ensures that you will be reading outside of your normal scope. This is good. On more than one occasion, I ran into some new subject in my work that I grazed once through an article I read for class.
• There was also, of course, the knowledge gained about terms and phrases and their translation. The same hard-to-translate phrases that I found in my work also came up in class. Yet this time there were 5 other translators to discuss it with.
• This is sort of a one-off situation, but one of the more practical tools that I learned about was sentence diagramming. The instructor suggested that I check into sentence diagramming as a method of helping me parse Japanese sentence structures and reconstruct them in English. I then bought a book on sentence diagramming and learned a lot from it. The instructor applied diagramming to translation to make it easier to approach the more difficult and strenuous paragraph-length sentences that often appear in Japanese.
• There were many more, but you get the picture.

Conclusion

• This class seemed more like a mini-internship forJ>E NSE translators rather than a class on translation. It was hard, but fruitful. In the end, the class was well worth the time and effort. It was such a worthwhile effort, in fact, that I took it twice, as have several of my classmates. I recommend it to all "beginning" translators.

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