Author: William Lise

I am a long-term (50-plus years) resident of Japan, and former electrical engineer, and I have been translating and interpreting for over four decades here in Japan.

A few stops along the way

Just a few random events in my life leading up to where I am, with many more-mundane things interspersed therebetween.

  • Born shortly after WW2 ended.
  • Grew up in New Rochelle, New York. 
  • Studied Russian at Defense Language Institute in Monterey, with about 1500 classroom hours (-1967). 
  • Went through SERE (survival, evasion, resistance, and escape) school, where we didn’t eat anythng for more than a week, were physically abused in interrogations, and at one point were placed in a small box, compressed into a painful Z-shape for about 20-30 minutes. It was fun?
  • Rode as a crewmember in a USN aircraft several months before it was shot down by North Korea in 1969.
  • Experienced a bit of survivor guilt by riding space-available on a US military medical evacuation flight in 1969 (the Vietnam war was raging), on which many of the “legitimate” passengers were on stretchers, some moaning and a few with missing limbs. 
  • Worked for about five years in a fiber optics laboratory (-1975).
  • Established and ran the Japan branch of a US manufacturer until 1979.
  • Took a Nobel Laureate (physics) to a tacky lunch place in Yokohama for a yakisoba lunch.
  • Interpreted in countless depositions related to intellectual property litigation in the US.
  • Japanese-to-English Translated hundreds of patents.
  • Was greatly relieved to barely avoid having to interpret for a teen victim of incestuous sexual abuse after the accused, her father, confessed.
  • Interpreted in a prison in Matsuyama for a visit to a convicted murderer. 
  • Interpreted the arrest and subsequent 35-plus-days of interrogations of a senior corporate executive (2018).
  • Translated over 1500 pages of diverse documents from a Japanese police investigation involving a US military person (2023).

And it goes on, but lately at a bit slower pace and, I’m happy to say, with a bit less excitement. 

Let’s get back to the real world, folks.

Now that international translation day celebrations are over, and we’ve all convinced ourselves—that includes me, of course—that professional translators are the best thing since sliced bread, it might be a good time to return to ground level and think seriously about what has already happened to the profession of translation.

Part of that needs to be active avoidance of what should be characterized as a level of denial and delusion on the part of both individual translators and their organizations that is not conducive to the development of useful strategies.

Extremely tough decisions need to be made, and those decisions need to be based on observable phenomena and facts, not wishful thinking and comfortable but baseless narratives.

Nobody here but us chickens.

I continue to see freelance translators characterize their work for translation agencies (resellers) as “collaboration.”

The use of this agency-promoted term greatly mischaracterizes the translator-agency relationship in most cases. 

In the majority of cases—probably almost all cases—translators are not involved in collaboration with translation agencies any more than a chicken is involved in collaboration with a poultry farmer when it lays an egg.

Just as poultry farmers cannot lay eggs themselves, translation agencies rarely have any translation capability. That’s why they purchase translations for resale.

And the very etymology of the word collaboration should show translators that it is inappropriate. The term collaboration is promoted by agencies to give freelancers a warm feeling that they’re a partner with an agency in a concerted effort to translate. That is very rarely the case.

I would never presume to be collaborating with my direct clients. I sell them translations, which they, just like translation agencies, are incapable of doing themselves.

For the small number of freelancers who might survive, I recommend discarding the term collaboration, as it hinders your own self-image as the owner of the translation process.