Content for Japanese-to-English TranslatorsNuts & Bolts, General Problems, and News

Survival

With most freelancers dependent on agencies for work and agencies quickly shifting to the MTPE business model, in which they don't order translation from translators, survival demands more than just being able to translate well.

Dinosaurs, Slide Rules, and Human Translators: Some Thoughts on Extinctions (November 20, 2023): Not all extinctions are created equal.
Acquiring Street Smarts 101 for Japanese-to-English Translators (November 5, 2023): Surviving in the new translation business environment.
Some Dos and Don't Bothers in the Post-MTPE World of Japanese-to-English Translation (October 30, 2023): Some inherited wisdom should be disgarded.
AI, the Desktop Publishing of the 21st Century (October 25, 2023): Perhaps rushing to adopt isn't the silver bullet.

Technical and Not-so-technical Translation Notes

This section will be rather fragmentary at first, basically a series of bits and pieces that can help translators over problems they didn't and couldn't learn at school.

No. 2: Beware of ファイ/φ/Φ and アール/R, False Friends from Drawings (October 24, 2024)
No. 1: LRT Joins SNS as a Latin-orthography Japanese Logogram (October 23, 2023)

Presentations & Publications

The Covid pandemic put a crimp in plans to make presentatons, so most of what you will find here is material from recent history. Hopefully the world will soon recover even to the point at which presentations return to their former frequency.

Getting from Tier Two to Tier One in Japanese-to-English Translation (June 30, 2019): With the agency MTPE business model, these suggestions are even more valid than they were in 2019.
J-E Patent Translation" Conference Proceedings, Nineteenth International Japanese/English Translation Conference (IJET-19) (April 12-13, 2008): Presentation made in Okinawa, Japan at a conference held by Japan Association of translators.
"Symbols, Abbreviations and Layout Issues in JA-EN Translation" (June 20, 1997): Eighth International Conference on Japanese/English Translation and Interpreting (IJET 97) held in Sheffield, UK, June 19-21, 1997. Japan Association of Translators.
Chapter 5 of Morita, Y. ed. Japanese Patent Translation Handbook. (1997; revised October 14, 2022): This 1997 American Translators Association publication is currently out-of-print, and we have now made available a recently (October 14, 2022) revised version of the content.
"An Investigation of Terminology and Syntax in Japanese and US Patents and the Implications for the Patent Translator". (May, 1994): From the Proceedings of the Fifth International Japanese-English Translation Conference (IJET-5) held in Urayasu, Chiba, Japan