Author: William Lise

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

The W-Word Seldom Heard from NHK News

Listening to the NHK coverage of several wars that are going on around the world, I’m wondering whether the people at NHK haven’t taken a hint from Fawlty Towers in reporting of war events. They certainly are reluctant to “mention the war,” and that includes numerous things going on in the world that are clearly and correctly referred to as wars every day by respected news sources around the world.

Wars in places such as Ukraine are referred to by NHK (in Japanese) as invasions, situations, conflicts, fighting, and other things, but almost never does NHK use the W-word.

To be fair, NHK does seem to allow non-NHK people who are being interviewed in somewhat uncontrolled and perhaps difficult-to-edit situations to use the W-word, but I have never heard it uttered from an NHK mouth in their news, and that W-word prohibition appears to extend to people who are being interviewed in an NHK studio, and who might be somehow connected to NHK, albeit via things other than NHK news; university professors come to mind. They are presumably asked to tow the non-war line, and tow it they do.

In a few online places where NHK reports the news in English, however, I have seen them use the W-word. It’s rather like “immigration,” the Japanese word for which is never used with regard to people coming to Japan to live, even permanently, although Japan has traditionally referred to its having an Immigration office. This could be the result of an unwarranted fear of the distaste the thought of immigration could evoke from the general populace.

Japanese is the only language that has any official standing in Japan. If something is said in English, it hasn’t been said, aguably doesn’t matter, and in any event can be denied by pointing to the officially recognized Japanese rendering or explanation. Japanese is the governing language, and English is provided only as a convenience; and the arrangement of deniable English is certainly convenient.

I think NHK needs to get real. Avoiding the use of the word war to describe what Russia is doing in Ukraine is not going to get Japan back its Northern Territories from Russia, and Japan was granted special permission from the the US to continue purchasing fuel from Russia in spite of the sanctions resulting from their war on Ukraine. NHK really needs to get real. It won’t cost anything, other than perhaps the loss of their reputation for being excessively careful even if it results in silly war-avoidance news coverage.

Oto-ire (音入れ) and O-toire (おトイレ): I’ve worked in both.

These two terms would appear identical (オトイレ) if written in Japanese phonetics, although they are distinguishable by an intonation difference and, of course, context. I have added hyphens to separate the semantic elements of each. These demonstrate why writing Japanese with phonetics syllabaries only is a non-starter, but that is a topic for a different post.

Oto-ire refers to the application of a sound track to a video, for example. My oto-ire (literally, sound insertion/entry) experience came with a request from a company to translate a narration of a video promoting their technology and products. They hired a professional to read my narration, and I sat in on the studio recording. I was there to handle problems in reading the narration (since it included some Japanese names) and to deal with any last-minute changes requested by my client, who was also present in the studio. This assignment provided me an informative look into how these things are done.

Fast forward a few years and we come to the toilet. My toilet experience was not working for a Japanese toilet manufacturer named after Dorothy’s dog, but we were surely not in Kansas anymore, because it required me to interpret while sitting in a toilet.

During a deposition interpreting assignment in Tokyo for patent litigation, there arose the sudden need to have a telephone conference with people in the US before the last day of depositions. A person from the Japanese party needed to participate.

We were to join in the conference from a hotel room in Tokyo. Amazingly, the telephone didn’t have even a speaker function, and we didn’t have the time to arrange for a conference-type telephone. Passing around the telephone handset while interpreting wasn’t going to work, so the solution we settled on was for me to sit in the toilet of the hotel room and interpret using the wall-mounted telephone handset provided there to enable hotel guests to answer phone calls while they were answering other calls, so to speak.

It worked fairly well, the only problem being the acoustics, which probably made me sound like I had my head in an empty barrel or perhaps in the toilet bowl.

Diversity of assignments and experiences is one of the things I enjoy about interpreting. But some interpreting jobs are garbage. One I had actually was garbage, and had me traipsing around two waste processing plants in Saitama with an environmental auditor.

You just never know where the next job will take you, but all of my subsequent encounters with toilets have been quite ordinary, and my interactions with garbage are limited to making short trips downstairs to deposit same.

Update on Google Alerts

A Google search alert on 日英翻訳 (Japanese-to-English translation) results in hits on some websites that actually discuss or mention JA-EN translation, but the search results also include a heavy sprinkling of porn sites that have successfully gamed the Google search engine (making it think they are about other things, JA-EN translation in this case) and ads for translation schools aimed at native Japanese speakers.

Accordingly, I have simply killed that search alert. It was quickly becoming useless, as much of the Internet is turning out to be, with the enshittification of cyberspace progesses unchecked.

AI Translation: Uncaring Emulation

I welcome entities that create documents using a collection of software commands known as an AI to order translations of those documents from a “colleague AI.” Those documents don’t deserve less, but they don’t deserve more.

Most entities, however, have sentient humans write things that need to be translated. Their translation deserves the skill and care that only human professionals can provide.

AI translation merely emulates human skill—sometimes not very well—by emulating the behavior of a human. To do that, AI doesn’t need to understand anything, and it doesn’t understand anything; it just emulates understanding.

The most serious flaw of AI translation, however, is that, when dealing with human clients needing translation, it is not capable of caring.

Uncaring emulation. Don’t you and your documents deserve better?

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.