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 he spoke for about 90, so we got some good practice at interpreting without a script.

The course has been a great learning experience so far. For one thing, it's shown me that I need to work on expressing myself in Japanese.

The techniques we're learning for simultaneous interpreting between Japanese and English have been illuminating. Japanese and English are very different structurally, and usually in order to translate a sentence, you need to look at the end.

Here's a contrived example, with the parts color-coded:

新しいバージョンは、Xがあって、Yがあって、前のバージョンより機能性が高くなりました。

You've got a topic, a bunch of "modifiers," or supporting information, and then the predicate. Normally, I'd translate that sentence something like the following, moving the predicate to the beginning, and turning the supporting information into one or more subsequent sentences:

The new version has improved capabilities over the previous one. It has X as well as Y.

This of course won't do with simultaneous interpretation. Especially considering that "X" and "Y" could be of arbitrary length (it's not uncommon for the topic and predicate to be far, far separated, even in spoken Japanese), if you waited until the end, you'd forget the sentence. Or even if you didn't forget it, while you were processing this sentence the next one would be flying by.

So they're teaching us techniques to kind of listen until you get a meaningful "chunk" of information, and discharge that while you listen to the next chunk. Here's an example from a passage where I can still remember how I interpreted it.

Japanese:

(1)バングラディッシュ　チッタゴン大学(2)の経済学教授ムハマド　ユヌス(3)と学生達が、ある村を調査している(4)最中に、素朴な竹製家具を作っている女性に出会いました。

My English interpretation:

(1)Chittagong University in Bangladesh (2)is where professor of economics Muhammad Yunus works. (3)He and his students were on a field trip to a village. (4)There, they encountered a woman who made simple bamboo furniture.

We always do a lot of preparation before each piece. In this case, the preparation included the Wikipedia pages on Grameen Bank and Muhammad Yunus, and the original English version of the article. Incidentally, the English version started, "During a field trip to a village, Muhammad Yunus…"

Tomorrow, we get to interpret for a mock trial, where a GI has been arrested for theft and assault. Very Okinawan topic!

I'm not really interested in becoming an interpreter, simultaneous or otherwise, but the profession has always fascinated me — simultaneous interpreters are kind of like the thoroughbreds to the slow-but-steady translator plow-horses.

My main goal for the course is to stretch myself in new ways. In particular, I'm hoping to train myself in interpreters' ability to think on their feet. I also am looking forward to going both from and into Japanese. I've lately been trying to write more Japanese, and study more translations from English into Japanese, and I think that this has increased my toolset for translating into English.

The course also promises to teach some people skills: everything from eye contact to correct posture (urp). I'm looking forward to an exhausting but valuable eight days.

Earlier in my career, I tried to stick to the style and terminology of the reference translations as much as possible. I figured that since the client had accepted those translations in the past, that was what it wanted. Even if the translation was very bad, I'd just plug my nose and send that pile off.

That turned out to be a bad idea. If I passed the trial, I would then need to translate 10 or more times the volume of the trial using that same painfully bad style.

After a few years, I started ignoring these "reference" translations, and doing what I thought was the best translation. I might look at references to get a feel for terminology, but I'll also diverge from the terminology in the reference if I think it's wrong.

I figured that even if the client didn't agree with me on translation style, at least this way I could look forward to passing the trial with anticipation instead of dread. I work almost exclusively for Japanese companies, and I've also found that I don't want to work for clients that prefer brain-dead chokuyaku. We're both better off if those types of clients find translators who write English just like in their middle-school English textbooks.

It also turns out to be a lot easier and less stressful to do what you consider to be your best work, rather than second-guessing your translation, wondering if this is what the client wants.

To my surprise, I found that after I took the policy of ignoring reference translations, I started passing a lot more trials. But when I thought about it, it made sense: the client was looking for a new translator because they weren't happy with their current provider. In retrospect, it seems like a pretty bad idea to copy the work of the guys who just got fired.

So, back to the trial from a few weeks ago. The prior translations were very bad, and since I'm knowledgeable about the subject matter (software specifications), I ignored them completely and did what I considered to be a good translation. Fortunately, the client not only liked the trial: they were thrilled with it, and although they were originally planning to place a 10-page job, that has turned into a 30-page job, with a promise of more work to come.

And the best thing is that I can use my own judgment to produce the best translation possible.

For some reason, the accepted translation for this term seems to have become "recycling oriented society" (it's the only one listed in the venerable Green Goddess).

The problem is that you almost never see this term used in genuine English documents. Since it doesn't seem very likely that this concept is unique to (or even originates in) Japan, I'm always on the lookout for a better way to express it.

So far, the best English equivalent I've found is "closed loop economy" ("economy" often serves when the Japanese talks about "society"). Unfortunately, clients often aren't adventurous enough to stray from the anointed dictionary translation, so I tend to keep a little collection of links that support my use "non-dictionary" translations.

Here's a comic where I spotted "closing the loop" being used in much the same way as Japanese uses 循環型社会:

We must "close the loop" and make all products
recyclable, reusable, or compostable

They recently contacted me about taking part of a big job, and agreed to my usual rates, so I accepted.

Big, BIG mistake.

Firstly, they sent me the file, saying it was about 3 pages. Then they immediately sent me three other files, saying they were higher priority, so I put the first file on the back burner and did the high-priority ones.

Then I open up the "3-page" file and found that it had a lot more than three pages. I called them in a panic, because the translation was due the next day.

Me: This file has a lot more text than 3 pages. Is this the right file, or do you just need part of it done?

Agency: Whoops, sorry. I left off a "0″ from the count. It's actually 30 pages.

Me: Holy crap, this job is due tomorrow and it's 10 times what you told me. But actually, the file has way more than even 30 pages.

Agency: Well yeah, actually it's 90 pages, but 60 pages worth are repetitions, so we just count the new stuff.

Me: ::boggle:: … Leaving aside how hard it makes it to schedule my time when you give me a word count 30 times lower than actual, I suppose that this means that you don't plan to pay anything for the repetitions that I translate.

Agency: Of course, since it's just a search and replace…

Me ::double boggle:: … Oh and by the way, I notice that you've done some sort of search and replace from your glossary, inserting English words into the middle of the Japanese text (and incidentally corrupting the file due to something wrong with the tool you used). I suppose that you don't plan to pay for the Japanese words that were replaced?

Agency: No, of course not, since we only pay for translation, and those words are already translated for you.

There's no way I'm going to do 90 pages in a day, no matter how much of it is "just search and replace" and helpfully interspersed with horrible translations from a glossary with sometimes comical results, but I agreed to do one third of the job because I made the commitment. But I am truly flabbergasted that a reputable translation agency could think that this is a normal way to deal with translators. Needless to say, this is the last job I will do for this agency.

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), and said, "No, I just put it on manner mode. Actually, I wish this translation agency would learn some manners."

Then I looked down at the phone, and saw that I had actually taken the call instead of putting it on manner mode, and the agency had heard everything I'd just said. Oops!

I thought about apologizing, but then I thought that what I had said was exactly right, although perhaps not delivered in the best way. So I just hung up and went on with my evening.

When I got back home at around midnight, I checked my email before going to bed. There was a job request from the agency that had called me. I emailed back saying that I could take the job, and within five minutes had a response thanking me. I guess the agency was really desperate to place that job! I think it still doesn't warrant calling someone at 10pm, though.

I very much doubt if the person from that agency reads this blog, but if you do, sorry for the manner remark. But you really shouldn't be calling translators at night. Email is fine any time.

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.

I've pair programmed before, and I've found that — perhaps counterintuitively — we actually got more work done than if we had worked alone, and the work was of better quality.

I wonder if this could be applied to translation as well: pair translation. Has anybody tried this? You might say that it wouldn't work because translation is such a slow process, but programmers only average a few hundred lines of code in a day, which is much less than translators' output, and they still get benefits.

The closest I've come to pair translation is when I was in the military as a "Spanish linguist." We'd frequently pair up with trainees, sometimes with us typing and the trainee watching, and sometimes the other way around. We called this "sitting sidesaddle."

Today, tools are improving to the point where even remote collaboration in the "pair translation" style should be possible. There are ways to share computer screens and chat live. I'm hoping to try out "pair translation" sometime.

Native writers of Japanese who translate into English tend to get defensive when they hear the "into your native language" mantra. They'll often state (quite rightly) that most native English-writing translators don't have sufficient grasp of Japanese or the subject matter to really do quality translations. And we're rare enough that often a sample of one or two gets generalized to a view of the whole population.

Meanwhile, those of us who are native writers of English note the simple fact that almost no J2E translation by a native writer of Japanese passes muster as a quality English document.

Which is fine. As long as you're honest with your customers and they're willing to pay you, then more power to you.

If I could earn more translating from English to Japanese than Japanese to English (the combination of rates and output), then I would translate English to Japanese if given offers to do so.

That said, I've also had the experience that even a competent translation by a non-native writer won't turn into a natural-reading document with just a "native check."

One has got to attain native-level writing ability if one wants to create top-quality translations, because adding a "checker" isn't enough. This is hard to do after a certain age, but by no means impossible. A case in point is Andrei Codrescu, a native of Romania who still has a noticeable accent but is a better writer of English and essayist than I'm likely to ever be. Here's one of his essays on NPR

It's also very hard, but not impossible, to gain enough understanding of a non-native language to do it justice in translation.

The standard argument outside Japan is that it's easier to do this than with writing. My own experience is that foreign-language acquisition has a rising curve of effort to results. Bare competence might take 6 months; conversational fluency a couple of years; a solid grasp of the language and its nuances a decade; true mastery a lifetime. Although the curve starts out steeper for the writing (production) side than the reading (comprehension) side, the two will catch up over time, given equivalent effort.

Of course, you always want to do the best possible job on the trial translation or first job; otherwise, you won't get any more work. But there's a line between putting a bit of extra spit and polish on your first couple of jobs, and creating the impression that your top translators will always be handling the client's work when you intended from the start to farm it off to your scrubs.

This is why when you buy translations through an agency, and you don't have access to the translators, you can never be sure of what you're getting. Clients need to check the quality of each translation, and look for downward trends.

Some agency customers appear to be cottoning on to the bait and switch, because lately I've been seeing more of them demand access to their translators. I wrote before about how I recently went with an agency to visit an end client that demanded access to the translator.

Then a couple of weeks ago, I started a contract with another agency whose end client demanded the CV of each translator on the project, and a guarantee that only the translators who team-translated the trial would do the translations for the contract.

The bid probably ended up higher than if the agency planned on swapping in scrubs down the road, but the end client is happy, because it gets the assurance that the same translators who sent in the winning trial are the ones who'll be doing the actual translations.

I think that the more agency-using translation buyers become aware of the old bait and switch, the more they'll demand direct access to translators, or at least guarantees of who'll be doing their translations.