Tag: translation

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.

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.

Don’t bother can be good advice.

Some weeks ago on LinkedIn, I made some comments about the lack of translation career opportunities for students of foreign languages, basically because of the adoption of AI to replace professionals in the translation process.

The comment was met with virtual nods of heads by some readers, but one person piped up to say that I discouraging newcomers from entering translation, thereby leaving more work for me. He actually sounded serious. He was chiding me for essentially telling students not to bother, and what’s worse, for personal gain.

Reflecting on that, I recall having a distinct experience of being one time told not to bother and having that be the best advice I could have gotten.

It was at the end of 1975. I had been working in a fiber optics laboratory of Western Electric in Princeton and had just completed the last half of an undergraduate engineering program at night. I had a degree in engineering, but that wasn’t going to lead to anything exciting at the laboratory, where the researchers were PhDs and there was nothing between engineering associate and member of research staff. So, I decided to move on and shift my focus.

I contacted the head of the Japanese department at a nearby university in Philadelphia to see if he would speak with me. He quickly agreed, and what ensued was enlightening. I was already functional in Japanese, and my interaction with him was in Japanese.

I had intended to get an advanced degree in Japanese. His advice was quick, being essentially “Don’t bother.” He explained that, with my already-acquired Japanese ability, I would not be learning any more language in a graduate program. He additionally (in a soft tone, not to be heard by several of his students in the room at the time) said “You can easily get an MA or even a doctorate, but do you want to be stuck like these people?”

His advice was clear; add my Japanese ability to my engineering degree and real-world experience and run with it, as that was much more promising that becoming a Japanese specialist.

Admittedly, this being the 1970s, it was still possible to become a translator of sorts with only foreign language or translation in your skill set, but his advice was spot on for me, and I only became a translator after a suddenly available job elsewhere provided me more than three years’ experience working as the Japan branch manager of a US manufacturer, that offering me a great learning experience that prepared me for the real world of providing language services to direct translation consumers.

Being told not to bother can be the best thing you can hear, if it opens your eyes to other, better opportunities.

I’ll repeat the advice to Japanese learners. Don’t bother learning Japanese if your goal is to be a translator. It’s too late. Your chances of success are tiny, and it would be better to just add Japanese ability to a solid qualification and skills in another area that would provide a career even without Japanese ability.

Don’t interpret, just translate.

I was interpreting one day in a deposition in the US Embassy and needed to make a comment on the record about why I had interpreted a certain term in English the way I did. Everyone appeared to understand and agree with the comment, but one of the attorneys piped up to say “Please don’t interpret, just translate.”

Both the interpreters in the room had to hold back from laughing. The attorney was demonstrating one of the reasons people outside the interpreting/translation tent often confuse the terms and call an interpreter a translator. I have often corrected people when they get these terms wrong, but I think we translators and interpreters (and the rare individuals do both translation and interpreting between JA and EN) might consider admitting defeat in the interpreter/translator battle.

It’s just a translator.

Some years ago I was interpreting in depositions at the US Consulate in Osaka. It happened that the opposing side’s interpreter, who would be interpreting for the attorney examining the deponent, was engaged rather suddenly and was not yet on the list of persons to be allowed into the Consulate. He was being made to wait on the first floor while they tried to work through the administrative problems to let him in.

Since the deposition couldn’t proceed without a lead interpreter (I was the check interpreter), we took a break. In the waiting area outside the deposition room, the deposition-taking attorney was at a window discussing the problem.

“Is it an attorney downstairs waiting to enter?” a Consulate official asked him.

“No, it’s just a translator (sic)” was the reply, referring to the interpreter.

The mistake of characterizing an interpreter as a translator aside, this makes me wonder how the attorney intended to examine the Japanese deponent if the person who is “just a translator” was stuck downstairs, waiting among huddled masses of visa applicants (mostly Brazilians that day, as I recall), yearning to breath free or whatever they intended to do in the US.

The interpreter in question is well-known and had spent many more years perfecting his professional skills than did the youngish above-noted attorney.