Author: William Lise

Long-term (49-plus years) resident of Japan. Former electrical engineer and have been translating and interpreting for over four decades.

Discount for Handwritten Translation?

One day sometime in the early 1990s, a new manufacturer client ordered the translation of a short description of a manufacturing process. I quoted my usual rate for such translations and told him I could have the translation back within about three days.

The client came back and asked me if I could do the translation for a lower rate if he could accept a handwritten translation. I needed to break the news to him that a handwritten translation would not only require a bit more time but also a higher fee.

At the time, the keyboard was still sensed by some Japanese people as being an impediment to writing. I believe most people have now overcome this view.

Don’t Ever Misgender a Dragon or Its Rainbow

I have a constellation of diverse and only tenuously linked hobbies and interests that often take me down rabbit holes that are, for good reasons, seldom explored. One of my interests is the Imperial Japanese Navy, and particularly its ships.

One of the ships built for Japan by Yarrow in Scotland (at the time, I believe) just before the Russo-Japanese War was named Niji. People who know Japanese will correctly take this to mean rainbow, but there is a twist. It is not written with the commonly seen character used for rainbow, 虹), but rather with the character 霓, which cannot be read easily or at all by most people walking around these days.

You might wonder what the difference is, and I discovered down a rabbit hole that in China there was a distinction, not between rainbows, but between their imagined pre-carnations. The 霓 character represents a rainbow that is an incarnation (vaporization?) of a female dragon, and the more-common 虹 is the rainbow that represents a male dragon. Who knew? Certainly not me.

I won’t delve into the issue of a rainbow being either male or female, other than to state my minor disappointment at seeing the rainbow, an image I like, being hijacked as an emblem of the LGBTQ people. But I digress.