The GITS Blog

I'm back from the fourth day of my intensive simultaneous interpreting course. Being halfway through the course, I'd thought I'd put down some thoughts while they're fresh. Today, we had our first live day of simultaneous interpreting, with a guest speaker. The manuscript he gave us beforehand would take about 15 minutes to read, and [...]

Starting next Monday (August 2), I'll be taking an eight-day, intensive simultaneous interpreting course at Okinawa Christian University. My friend and colleague David Ulvog is one of the instructors, and I think that I heard about the course from him. I'm not really interested in becoming an interpreter, simultaneous or otherwise, but the profession has [...]

A few weeks ago, a translation agency asked me to do a trial translation for a potential new client. They sent me a short text to translate, and a few past translations that the potential client had commissioned before to serve as a reference. (The agency paid me for this trial, incidentally. An agency that [...]

If you translate out of Japanese, you've probably come across the term "循環型社会." According to wikipedia, it means "a society that efficiently uses and reuses finite resources in a sustainable cycle" (my translation). For some reason, the accepted translation for this term seems to have become "recycling oriented society" (it's the only one listed in [...]

I recently took a job from a translation agency that will remain nameless. I had passed their test some time ago, but didn't do much work for them because their rates were usually too low for me. They recently contacted me about taking part of a big job, and agreed to my usual rates, so [...]

The other evening, I was out at a pub with some friends, when my cell phone went off at around 10pm. My friends asked me if I was going to take the call. I pulled out the phone, and saw it was from a translation agency, so I put it on "manner" mode (vibration mode), [...]

Last week, I launched my latest development project: The official site for the band Murasaki (紫). I was happy to take on this project, partly because Murasaki is something of a legend in the Japanese rock scene (and especially here in their home prefecture of Okinawa), and partly because it would be a good chance [...]

I feel fortunate to be a freelance translator. It's allowed me to choose where and how I work. A couple of weeks ago, someone close to me died after a long fight with cancer. When we both lived in mainland Japan, we'd talk about moving to Okinawa, and living a more relaxed life. One day, [...]

I've created a repository for my mailer module on bitbucket. Here's the project URL: http://bitbucket.org/ginstrom/mailer Apparently you can't open write access to everyone, so if you'd like write privileges, then please let me know your account name. About mailer mailer is a wrapper around the Python email and mimetypes libraries.

IJET-21 is under way, and this year it's being broadcast live! Link to broadcast feed Kudos to Mike Sekine and the others who made this possible. If you translate between Japanese and English, but didn't get a chance to go to IJET, then by all means check it out.