Category: Shrapnel Removed from a Word Warrior

Throwbacks to some silly things and some meanngful things, brought to you by a veteran translator/interpreter.

The Duty English Speaker

Back around 1978, I had an appointment to see a fellow at a facility of Cannon just on the Tokyo side of the Tamagawa. Never wanting to make people wait, and more particularly wanting to leave enough time to find this facility that I was visiting for the first time, I left the office of the US company I was so early that I arrived far ahead of my appointment time. I resigned myself to cooling my heels for a while in the waiting area normally located just outside the receptionist desk.

These days, receptionist desks here are sometimes provided with telephones and a list of numbers to call. At the time, a carbon-based receptionist was standard.

I announced myself, handing over my Japanese business card and, apologizing for being so early, said that I would be fine waiting, no need to rush the person I was to meet with.

I related this to the receptionist in perfectively fine sales-ready Japanese. Her response was “Just a moment” in somewhat strange English, and she hurriedly called someone on the phone. I was hoping it was not the person I was to meet, because he might have felt obligated to drop what he was doing and come out to greet me. That fear was unwarranted, but what transpired was a bit odd.

The receptionist was calling an English-speaking person to rescue her from her problem with this foreigner in the lobby. Emergency, emergency, foreigner in lobby; this is not a drill!

I was sat down in the lobby and told (again, in strange English) that someone would be there shortly.

The person who arrived was not the person with whom I had an appointment, but rather someone you could call the duty hapless English speaker, who probably gets called in for such emergency situations.

When this fellow sat down with me, it was apparent to both of us what had gone wrong. We laughed and chatted for a while, after which he assured me that he would let the fellow I was there to see know that I had arrived but could wait.

This kind of thing is not so common nowadays, but there is still the expectation on the part of some people in Japan that when you see a foreigner’s lips moving, what is happening is English speech, and you need to react accordingly.

Discount for Handwritten Delivery: Japan’s lingering love affair with low-tech methods

Back in mid-1980s, I was contacted by a manufacturer here in Japan to translate a product manual from Japanese to English.

I quoted the job as a total amount on the basis of the volume I could see from the source text I had been given. The client replied, asking me if there was some way I could lower the fee. He asked if I would be willing to grant a discount if he would accept a handwritten translation. I needed to tell him—and so I did tell him—that there would be an extra charge if he wanted a handwritten translation.

People who are surprised at this need to think of the cultural and technological context. At the time, Japan was just getting to where it could produce printed matter without using a complex mechanical Japanese typewriter. Traditionally, the typewriter, and even the much simpler typewriter for production of English documents, was seen as a foreign element in the business environment, a hurdle to get over and more troublesome than just handwriting things. The lingering popularity of the fax machine is in some sense a testament to the lingering popularity of handwritten things and the view of keyboarding something as troublesome.

The client ultimately agreed to a “normal” translation, produced neatly as an output from my computer.

30 Years ago and 7 years ago

It is March 20 in Japan and today we mark not only the Vernal Equinox, but also the 30th anniversary of the sarin gas mass murders committed in the subway in Tokyo by the Aum Shinrikyo cult in 1995. The media is alive with coverage looking back on that domestic terrorism and looking at the present of some of the survivors.

It was a high-profile incident and a long, high-profile trial, leading to the criminals being executed 23 years later, in 2018 at the Tokyo Detention House, something I was told about just a few months later as I started what would be a 35-consecutive-day interpreting assignment at that same facility, in a case that was also certainly also high profile and in the news for months, but that did not involve mass murders, or any violence, for that matter.

The successor of the Aum Shinrikyo, Aleph, is still apparently operating as a cult, collecting “believers” and their money, and is still considered a dangerous group.

That said, Japan has not been very good at neutralizing such cults. Perhaps it’s because some of them lay claim to being religions and Japan has a rather dark history of being nasty to religions that it doesn’t like. It has had a dificult time bringing The Unification Church to justice, and that group is still open for business under a different name, but with the same goals of sucking up money from victims.

Sorry, my business card is only in Japanese.

One day long ago, when I was the President of the Japan Association of Translators, I attended an event held by the Japan Translation Federation, a group that is for all intents and purposes operated by translation agencies in Japan.

It was mostly a socializing event. The JTF is under the aegis of a Japanese governmental ministry and I was introduced as the head of JAT to a person from that ministry. We exchanged business cards, the side of the mine shown to this person being in Japanese and indicating clearly my position in JAT—a group of translators, rather than translation agencies—and my profession as a translator.

His reaction—after receiving and looking at my business card—was to hand me his card, saying “Please excuse me, my card is only in Japanese.”

This guy was just told I was the head of a translators’ organization in Japan, I was speaking Japanese, and handed him a business card that said the same about me.

At first, I thought to make a quip about this stupidity, then discarded the idea, but ultimately did tell him that “When you are a Japanese-to-English translator, reading Japanese is part of the job. I suspect he didn’t catch the sarcasm.

I wonder whether things have changed much. Many Japanese have been conditioned by trained-bear foreigners on TV here speaking Japanese of a variety, some quite well, but a foreigner translating or even reading Japanese could still be an oddity to some Japanese. Some surely some cling to the belief that Japan and the language spoken by Japanese is so unique it cannot be mastered without having Japanese DNA. Bless their hearts.

How old were you during the war?

I interpreted in a deposition of a senior executive of a major Japanese corporation in connection with patent litigation in the US. Things were going well, until one question from the examining attorney near the end of the allotted time for the deposition.

The question came just after the attorney went back at the end of the deposition to ask about the educational background of the deponent, something that is normally done at the beginning of a deposition. In part of his reply, the Japanese executive indicated that he attended the Army Cadet School just before WW2. This prompted the attorney to ask “So how old were you during the war?”

This was to be a jury trial in a state that is not known for being generous with non-Americans. The attorney was fully aware of that, and I can only imagine that it would be seen as advantageous for the jury to think that the deponent had—or at least was old enough to have had—participated in WW2.

Naturally, the attorney on the defending side justifiably went berserk. Such a question had no bearing on the merits of the case. Getting to watch this kind of provocation and the reactions thereto unfold is arguably a benefit to deposition interpreters. Mostly, though, it is mind-numbingly boring, particularly if the subject matter is something the interpreter is not interested in.