Tag: Japanese

過剰仮名表記化を止めましょう

I nominateトクリュウ for a yet-to-be-established award for Japanese terms that need not be rendered—and are best not rendered—in kana.

Neither of the two characters of the Japanese expression 匿流, the abbreviation of the term 匿名・流動型犯罪グループ would be difficult to understand if left as kanji. Both are taught during the mandatory schooling years in Japan, and both kanji conjure up understandable meanings, not because they are “ideograms,” but because they are logograms used in other common expressions. One is 匿名, meaning anonymous, and the other, 流動 means flow or fluid. Both these characters are constituent parts of the longer, proper expression.

Is abbreviation called for? Perhaps. But there’s no need for kana, I think, since people not familiar with the proper original expression might not understand it, and that undermines the purpose of the communication, unless the purpose is to demonstrate the desire of the communicator to appear trendy.

The representation of this expression in kana might seem trendy, but it hides the terms behind the abbreviation. My guess is that many native Japanese speakers are not yet familiar with the proper underlying expression—quite similar to the situation with the Japanese term SNS (which I will discuss at another time)—and many probably could not provide a proper explanation of the term, beyond being able to either link the kana expression to specific recent crimes or generically describe types of associated crimes, nicknames of criminals, or places such as Myanmar or the Philippines from encountering the term in crime news coverage recently.

This trend to abbreviate in Japanese can get out of hand. It is sometimes useful, but when it combines with kanaization, it can fail to help even native Japanese speakers understand what is meant.

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.

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.

Mixed Kanji/Katakana Feelings

At one time many years ago, because my surname was sometimes misheard by Japanese speakers on the phone, I made a habit of orally glossing my name with “利益のリに是非のゼ. It apparently usually worked, perhaps because most people realized I was not a Japanese native and was giving them the pronunciation as rendered in katakana. It backfired one day, however, perhaps in a way that might give me confidence in my Japanese speaking ability.

After phoning someone and being told that a person I needed to speak with would be returning to the office in a while and would return my call, I left a message, giving my name in the above manner.

About two hours later, I received a phone call from someone asking for Toshikore-san. The person on the other end of the call could not see me figuratively slapping my forehead in recognition of what caused the problem of him thinking he was phoned by this person Toshikore. What had happened was that the person taking my message wrote down not the phonetics associated with two kanji characters, but rather the kanji characters themselves, thereby rendering what could look like—at least to an older reader—the name Toshikore (利是). It was sort of like a dog owner pointing to a stick they had thrown to have their dog fetch it and having the dog instead fetch the owner’s hand. But it was nonetheless my fault; I was pointing to the wrong stick.

I bade farewell to that flawed phonetic device and switched to explaining explicitly that my name was written with two katakana glyphs.