Author: William Lise

Long-term (40-plus years) resident of Japan. Former electrical engineer and have been translating and interpreting for over four decades.

過剰仮名表記化を止めましょう

I nominateトクリュウ for a yet-to-be-established award for Japanese terms that need not be rendered—and are best not rendered—in kana.

Neither of the two characters of the Japanese expression 匿流, the abbreviation of the term 匿名・流動型犯罪グループ would be difficult to understand if left as kanji. Both are taught during the mandatory schooling years in Japan, and both kanji conjure up understandable meanings, not because they are “ideograms,” but because they are logograms used in other common expressions. One is 匿名, meaning anonymous, and the other, 流動 means flow or fluid. Both these characters are constituent parts of the longer, proper expression.

Is abbreviation called for? Perhaps. But there’s no need for kana, I think, since people not familiar with the proper original expression might not understand it, and that undermines the purpose of the communication, unless the purpose is to demonstrate the desire of the communicator to appear trendy.

The representation of this expression in kana might seem trendy, but it hides the terms behind the abbreviation. My guess is that many native Japanese speakers are not yet familiar with the proper underlying expression—quite similar to the situation with the Japanese term SNS (which I will discuss at another time)—and many probably could not provide a proper explanation of the term, beyond being able to either link the kana expression to specific recent crimes or generically describe types of associated crimes, nicknames of criminals, or places such as Myanmar or the Philippines from encountering the term in crime news coverage recently.

This trend to abbreviate in Japanese can get out of hand. It is sometimes useful, but when it combines with kanaization, it can fail to help even native Japanese speakers understand what is meant.

Get real (again)!

The Internet and social media in particular, which essentially guarantee anonymity and prevents accountability, have pretty much destroyed trust. When the current torrent of AI-generated text and images is added to the picture, trust can safely be declared dead, and it shows no signs of being resurrected. 

This technology was exciting and promising at the outset some decades ago, but it has gone astray, led off the path by the promise to platform providers of fabulous wealth and by the arguably justified confidence that the ignorance and inaction of people sleeping at the wheel, including both legislators and user-victims, would protect their gold mine.

Given the poor prognosis for recovery, I think it’s time to retreat from the digital world and advance (back) into the real world, and the real world is not on your iPhone screen or computer display.

Get real!

False friends are sometimes talked about by enemies.

False friends are sometimes talked about by enemies.
Long, long ago, I was sitting in an aircraft listening to a language I don’t work with anymore, having almost totally lost my speaking ability, while retaining some reading ability, in that language. I heard the following, spoken by someone in another aircraft.

[Я] выпустил шланг.

When I was growing up in the US I was exposed (linguistically, anyway) to the last word in that sentence (shlang) but only in its borrowed meaning in Yiddish slang as spoken in the US.

That meaning is generally understood (although frequently spelled differently) in the US across ethnic and language boundaries, and I was rather surprised that someone in a military aircraft would announce that he had let it out. I would’ve thought that he would have kept it to himself, so to speak.

I was young and inexperienced, and in spite of my high grades in Russian, I did not understand the borrowed sense of the word in Russian (hose). Before I realized what was being talked about, the revelation of its being let out caused me to chuckle.

A colleague sitting next to me in our aircraft didn’t realize what was going on; I was listening (it then occurred to me) to an air-to-air refueling exercise, and he was listening to something else.

And now back to regular programming.

Surprise! ChatGPT thinks it knows me.

I asked ChatGPT who William Lise is, and it came back with this in just a few seconds.

It believed everything I say about myself on my own website. Good for ChatGPT. It slipped up, however, by including, ostensibly as a photo of me, a photo of a guy who died in New Zealand a few years ago. Nice try. I am still around. A translator in Austria, Michael Bailey, helped me with this, probably by using image search.

LISE, Steven William

Please, Microsoft!

Please, Microsoft, stop promoting things to users of LinkedIn that are patently bullshit. Your AI should be able to figure out what is bullshit, but maybe there’s money to be made by promoting bullshit.

With the only clients most freelance translators can acquire quickly moving to eliminate their need to use and pay professional translators, Microsoft’s LinkedIn recently decided to suggest a post for me from a translator advising beginning translators not knowing where to start to do volunteer translating.

The post ends with the requisite wall of hashtags aiming at getting engagement, and it features a lovely carousel of places that want free translation. It’s classic LinkedIn eye candy and totally meaningless.

There is a good reason why new translators don’t know where to start, and it’s because there are almost no places and ways to start translating for a living since AI use by translation-brokering agencies transformed the business of freelance translating into a non-business.

Almost no translators, and particularly newcomers, are fit-for-purpose in a market that does not value professionals and requires professionals wanting to survive to engage in translation as a business, for a while, anyway, until everything goes away.

The subject suggested post, of course, gives no hint as to what these volunteer translators should do to earn a living after they virtue signal with pro bono translation and build a portfolio of work they’ve done for free. There are very few ways to make a living translating these days, and those very few ways are accessible to only a tiny number of translators. Let’s stop the bullshitting. People dreaming of being translators need to be told to look elsewhere to make a living. They don’t need to keep their day job, they need to search for one.