Category: Brain Drippings

• 茱萸沢 is read Gumizawa. It’s a place in Gotemba that I encountered in an interpreting assignment this past week.
• Drexel University in Philadelphia can find the diploma of a person who graduated more than a half-century ago, didn’t have a record of his student number (why would he?), and just told them his name, date of birth, approximate graduation date, and major. They found it, and the diploma—I don’t need something in a frame, but putting it in a frame is probably how they justify charging USD 150)—is arriving next week in a package that UPS said is 2 lbs, according to the notification I received today.

Things I learned last month:

• I am not a bastard (at least in one sense of the word), attested to by the marriage certificate of my long-departed parents obtained from my hometown.
• The purported Japanese name of Defense Language Institute in Monterey (at least as purported on a Japanese-language Wikipedia page about that school) is アメリカ国防総省語学学校. Why the Japanese turn language into linguistics is beyond me. I guess it sounds more impressive. I don’t recall learning any “linguistics” there in the 1960s, but rather the language spoken in the country that was forced to change its name but not much else a few decades after I graduated.

The classroom time at DLI was more than 1500 hours. That’s equivalent to numerous years in a university language program. Although I had extremely good grades, I managed to lose almost all my speaking ability in that language quite quickly, but that is totally unrelated to the translation and interpreting services I currently provide.