William Lise – Page 25

Japanese Government-mandated Orthography Chaos

Japan was considerably later than numerous other civilizations in acquiring a written language. When it did, it was basically by adopting Chinese characters to the task of writing Japanese. Those characters are still used, and promoters of schemes to replace them totally with phonetic writing have universally failed. They’re here to stay.

Before the early 20th century, the use of kanji logograms (not ideograms, a long-standing misconception I might write about shortly) in Japan was without much government interference or guidance. It was a lawless land of kanji logograms.

Then came the kanjicrats, with numerous well-meaning attempts to regulate or guide use of kanji, most of which did not reflect—and was ineffective in controlling—the way kanji were used in real life. Some of the highlights of the kanji evolution in Japan are as follows.

1923	Joyo Kanji Table May 9 1962 characters, 154 abbreviated characters
1931	147 characters removed from and 45 characters added to the Joyo Kanji Table, making it 1858 characters.
November 16, 1946	Toyo Kanji Table established by cabinet order (Cabinet Notification/Order) (1) 1850 characters for use in statutes, public documents, newspapers, and general society) (2) Proper nouns such as personal names and place names are exceptions, considered separately because of legal and other reasons.
February 16 1948	Toyo Kanji onyomi and kunyomi Tables and Toyo Kanji Separate Table established (Cabinet Notification/Order) (1) Generated to indicate the onyomi and kunyomi to be used going forward for each of the characters in the Toyo Kanji table. (2) 881 characters (so-called educational characters) of the Toyo Kanji table listed as necessary to teach during compulsory education to enable reading and writing.
April 28, 1949	Toyo Kanji Character Form Table (Cabinet Notification/Order) (1) Created to show the standard form of kanji in the Toyo Kanji table (2) To facilitate and make accurate the reading and writing of characters in the table, organization of simplified characters and unification as much as possible in accordance with printed character forms.
May 25, 1961	Personal Name Character Table (Cabinet Notification/Order) 92 Kanji characters indicated for use in proper nouns.
July 30, 1976	Added Personal Name Character Table (Cabinet Notification/Order) 28 Characters added for use in personal names.
October 1, 1981	Joyo Kanji Table (Cabinet Notification/Order) (1) 95 Characters added to the Toyo Kanji table for use in statutes, public documents, newspapers, magazines, broadcasting, and daily life in writing Japanese, making the character count 1945 (2) Place names and personal names are treated as exceptions. (3) The Joyo Kanji list of characters should be used as a reference in selecting names for children.
December 8, 2000	(Response from the National Language Council) Non-listed character list of characters for printing established (1022 characters) as standard printing character forms. JIS standard JIS X 0213 modified accordingly.
Subsequent Addition of Characters for Personal Names
1981	54 characters added.
February 2004	Several characters added, making the total number of characters for personal names 290.
September 27, 2004-9-27	488 characters added + 205 characters added () Of the 205 characters, 195 are old forms of Joyo Kanji, 10 are the old forms of characters for personal names. This makes the current number of personal name kanji is 290 + 488 + 205, for a total of 983. As of 2010, the list of Joyo Kanji* includes 2136 characters.

All of that said, while the print and broadcast media (particularly NHK) are careful not to use “unlisted characters,” there are countless instances of Japanese writers ignoring the above guidelines. Even Japanese patent specifications—arguably public documents—provide numerous examples of characters not included in the current Joyo Kanji list of 2136 characters. And, of course, most literate Japanese, which includes a higher portion of the population than in cultures with ostensibly “easier” languages, are able to read and use many characters beyond the official lists.

Another aspect of kanji that I have noticed is that, while many anglophones comment that kanji are so difficult that young students are unduly burdened, I have almost never heard such comments from native Japanese speakers, outside of educators. Kanji are just accepted by the general public, like the air around us, with no complaints heard or reforms demanded, except perhaps from lingering kanjicrats in government agencies.

Front-loaded Quality: Not much back then, and nothing much has changed.

In Japanese-to-English translation, the need to cut costs and the long-held folk beliefs by some native Japanese speakers have often taken precedence over the value of front-loading quality into the translation process.

Back in the late 1970s, most Japanese-to-English translation was done by native Japanese speakers (NJSs), with varying degrees of ability to translate and to write in usable English. There is strong evidence that the demographic makeup of at least the humans still translating remains largely the same, particularly when you consider in-house translators in Japanese entities.

Those translations were often then subjected to what was then (and even now, apparently) called a “native check,” which very often, particularly back then, was characterized as a “brush up” performed by a native English speaker (NES) who would sometimes not be Japanese-capable, making referring to the source text impossible and meaningless. The salient characteristic of this workflow was that frontloading of quality was not part of the translation process. Quick and cheap, followed by repair was the norm.

Numerous hapless foreigners were employed in such work in Japan, some were English teachers, others were recruited from among in-house foreigners working in Japanese companies, but who were not necessarily hired as translators or editors. They just had the misfortune to be standing around when a translation needed a “native check.”

As they became more numerous, NES translators started receiving more JA-EN translation work. There was still, however, a lingering uneasiness among many Japanese clients that a non-Japanese person couldn’t actually understand all the nuances of something written in Japanese. And could they really read the characters? I have been asked as much at translation conferences, even after it was clear that I am a JA-EN translator. One such encounter happened when I attended a translation gathering of the Japan Translation Federation as the head of Japan Association of Translators.

Perhaps more importantly as a business reality, however, NES translators were considerably more expensive than their NJS counterparts, so the process of making a rough translation and having it repaired continued for years. Again, front-loading of quality took a back seat to other concerns.

Decades went by and the number of NES translators who could convince clients of their capabilities gradually grew.

Enter machine translation, years before the AI hype. This gradually turned many translation opportunities for freelancers into opportunities to repair not poor translations done by an NJS human, but rather the output of an MT system, resulting in their earnings tanking even further, as translation consumers demanded cost cutting.

What is happening is that professional humans are being replaced in the translation process by collections of software commands with insufficiencies that are supposed to be fixed by professional humans, but at a fraction of the earnings that were possible when those humans were still being trusted to translate. Post-editing repair crews come to the rescue. Many translators are not eager to take on such work, but numerous translators have few other options, particularly ones in mid-career or later. And that is where freelance translation sits as I write this.

Things I can do without ♫ In Kvetchalot ♫

I am on the high-functioning curmudgeonism spectrum—high-functioning so that people don’t think I’m dysfunctional, and spectrum, so that I benefit from the trendy “spectral advantage.”

I have problems with numerous things. I would have “issues” with them, but I just cannot purge the word problem from my active vocabulary. Such is the cross that must be borne by a person who arrived just about a month before the baby-boomers.

Problems I kvetch about form a list that grows, shrinks, and changes to suit what pisses me off on any particular day. Some of the items remain unchanged, however. Here are some current annoyances, some frequent annoyers, and a few targets of annoying opportunity.

Foreigners in Japan who know almost nothing about the country, the culture, and the language, yet who stay here for years, endlessly complaining about Japan
Foreigners in Japan who know almost nothing about the country, the culture, and the language, yet are hopelessly and senselessly in love with Japan and everything Japanese and cannot bring themselves to see that, like all countries, some things are awry in Japan. There is a significant overlap between these people and those who can’t name any Japanese food other than sushi.
Foreigners who think that Japanese eat sushi all the time.
Foreigners who believe that veganism is common in Japan and that everybody here is a devout Buddhist. Perhaps that’s true in the atypical places they hang out, or what the view of Japan is where they live.
Social media companies such as Meta, which use information donated to them by their willing victims to make money by helping their criminal clients.
People sending spam selling fake goods from China.
Spam selling fake goods from China.
Fake goods from China.
China.
Japanese ketchup bottles designed so that, when squeezed, they remain in the squeezed shape unless they are carefully coaxed back to their designed shape. Definitely a candidate for what should be established as the Japanese government’s Bad Design award.
Public toilets in Japan with neither paper towels nor hot-air hand driers. If you expect people to wash their hands after pissing or shitting, please provide means for them to dry their hands. My response is not to wash my hands in such places; no apology is needed.
Train station platforms in Japan with no trash bins decades after the Aum Shinrikyo sarin-gas domestic terrorism that prompted railroads to take them away, for fear that they would serve as drop points for poison sarin gas bombs. Many people have long-since forgotten why they can’t find these receptacles.
People getting so drunk in Japan that they need to chuck their noodles in public. To be fair, this behavior has become quite rare, but one is still occasionally treated in the morning to sidewalk “flower displays” of last night’s noodles.
Japanese broadcast media that avoid mentioning cigarette smoking in the same breath (or in the same news story) with cancer or other specific ailments. This is probably either because they are NHK, certainly influenced by the Japanese government, which is the leading shareholder of Japan’s only tobacco company, Japan Tobacco, or because they are private broadcasters making money from JT’s “health-washing” corporate identity advertising.