After the time is up, it creates a mecha-robot for you. The more you got right, the cooler your robo.

Selecting the kanji for koutei in the IME

IME lets you choose between various "input methods": direct input (normal keyboard typing), hiragana (which can be converted to kanji as needed), katakana, and so on. With the exception of direct input, you have to enter characters and then accept your input after performing various conversions on it. For example, to enter kanji characters (which are far too numerous to correspond to single keys on a keyboard), you enter how the kanji is pronounced, and then select the correct kanji for that pronunciation (of which there may be many).

The most useless input method has got to be "half-width alphanumeric." Under this input method, what you type at the keyboard is entered just like with direct input, except you've got to "accept" every string you type.

I can't see any reason why someone would want to use this input method. If you want to enter half-width alphanumeric characters, you would go to direct input and type them normally. It seems to me that the software designers only added this feature because they could, not because there was any use for it.

Half-width alphanumeric input in Notepad

The problem is, on my Japanese keyboard, there's a key to switch the input method right next to the (shorter) space bar. It's thus really easy to hit this key by accident, and switch the input method. And what is the method it switches to? Half-width alphanumeric. Arrg!

This scheme also has a more insidious impact on Japanese to English translators. Since Japanese has no distinction of upper and lower-case letters, clever IME developers have figured out that if you type an upper-case letter while in Japanese input mode, you want a Roman alphabet letter. Japanese writers have therefore learned that if they want to quickly insert an English word into their Japanese, they should capitalize it. Some have become so used to seeing English words capitalized in this way, they'll insist that the words stay capitalized in your English translation (that you must use the same English words that they chose is a foregone conclusion). Double arrg! And a curse on IME developers everywhere.

I recently bought the book いいまちがい (Japanese Made Funny), a bilingual collection of funny errors made by foreigners speaking Japanese.

One of my favorites was a guy who wanted a hamburger with no ketchup or other condiments. He calls up his Japanese friend, and asks him how to say "plain" in Japanese. The friend tells him it's 飛行機 (hikoki; "airplane"), and the guy proceeds to go to McDonald's and ask for a 飛行機のハンバーガー ("airplane" burger).

In this spirit, I'll share what I think is my funniest Japanese blunder. I had just come to Japan for the first time, as an exchange student. I had also just been married about four months before that.

I went to the neighborhood drug store to buy some condoms. I looked all over the store, but couldn't find them. Finally, I saw the store owner watching me, so I asked him. I didn't know the word for "condom" in Japanese, but I knew that in Spanish it's "condón," so I guessed and asked for コンドン (kondon — where the right word was コンドーム; kondoomu).

For some reason, the store owner thought I must be looking for cold medicine. He started going around and asking the customers, "Have you ever heard of a cold medicine called 'kondon'? This man is looking for 'kondon'." As a crowd started to gather round, I found it harder and harder to let the store owner know what I was really looking for; especially since it would probably have involved some rather expressive gestures.

Instead, I told him that I'd go home and look up the word I wanted in the dictionary, and high-tailed it out of there, leaving a bemused crowd of Japanese people behind me. After that, I avoided the store, but some time later I went in with my wife and bought some condoms — and saw the owner have an "aha" moment.

US $0.42/word certainly sounds a lot more enticing than the $0.10/word or so I see bandied about on sites like proz (and sometimes much less). Of course, this translation is going to require a very skilled translator, with a high level of knowledge of the field. From the offer:

The University of Tokyo has embarked on a project to make outstanding work by its faculty in the Humanities and Social Sciences available in English translation. The titles selected will be published by leading academic publishers in the English-speaking world.

The translator is also going to have to work closely with the publisher, probably going through several revisions and proofing the camera-ready copy prior to printing. That's more work than the "fire and forget" mode of translation that's common when you go through agencies.

This rate isn't all that unusual. ¥38/word is about on a par with what the top translation agencies in Japan charge (about 50-75% of which makes it to the translator). It's middling for direct clients with highly demanding work. The University of Tokyo seems to be trying to cut out the middleman, thereby attracting a higher caliber of talent for the same money as going through an agency. An institution like UT has the administrative and publishing capabilities to handle such a task on its own.

I hope this can serve as another point on the graph to those wondering what freelance translators (especially Japanese-to-English) actually charge. Beginning translators especially tend to only see the bottom end of the rate scale, offered by the low-end agencies willing to hire inexperienced translators. But there's quite a large range available, depending on your talent, experience, knowledge, and marketing skills.

So far, I haven't felt any ill effects from the recession. I'm as busy as ever, and my schedule is booked fuller than usual; in fact, I was hoping to take the rest of December off, but it looks like I'll have to translate half days on December 28th and 29th in order to meet my January deadlines.

One thing I have noticed is several new companies approaching me, and asking me to work for what I'd consider very low rates (60% of my normal rates or lower). Since these are offers of work that I haven't solicited, I interpret them as companies smelling blood, and trying to take advantage of translator panic by securing low-cost providers. But it's frankly pretty hard to feel panicked when you've already got all the work you can handle.

I started translating well into Japan's "lost decade" — the massive recession starting in the early 90s precipitated by Japan's own real-estate bubble and subsequent meltdown. Despite getting my start during a huge recession, I had no trouble finding work. Old timers who were translating during and before the bubble tell me that after the recession hit, the same amount of work was available as before the bubble burst. That makes sense, because translation is generally a cost of doing business: if you want to sell your stuff outside Japan, you've got to localize your materials. If companies could get away with doing less translation, they would have already made the cuts. But the sky-high rates you used to hear about — like $100/page or more for routine translation — have been relegated to history, alas.

So I'm preparing for rough times despite seeing nothing but good times in my own business. I'll just keep tilling my little patch here in Okinawa, while keeping an eye out for a big tsunami rolling down from the mainland. If I do start getting less work, or find it impossible to command my current rates, then living in inexpensive Okinawa and having relatively modest spending habits ought to put my family in good stead.

I booked my flight to Australia online via Jetstar. Using amazing high-tech IP-geolocation techniques, Jetstar figured out that I was in Japan and decided to treat me to its Japanese-language site. Fair enough; but if you're going to foist off your localized site, you ought to make sure you get it right.

And Jetstar didn't quite. The most egregious example was their confirmation email, which started like this:

Imagining for a moment that I am Japanese (Jetstar did, so why can't you?), the use of my first name followed by the Hiragana "sama" is really out of place. As a customer, I'd expect my last name (Ginstrom) to be properly written in Japanese characters (ジンストロム), followed by the Kanji character for "sama" (様).

Although the use of the first name is fairly widespread in the English-speaking world, it's a big no-no with customer communication in Japanese.

A word about templates

The problem stems from the use of templates for emails and dynamic Web pages. I imagine that the original email template went something like this:

Where "$name" will be replaced dynamically from the database with the first name.

The site developers must have just passed off this template to be translated. The translator has no control over what gets written for the "$name" value, which the computer is going to fill in with "Ryan," or more normally, "Hanako" or "Taro." The translator, faced with a no-win situation, probably opted for the hiragana "sama" (さま) because it looks less strange with a first name in Roman characters than the Kanji "sama" (様) would.

Localization isn't (just) translation

What they needed to do was modify the template so that the last name of the customer would be entered in Kanji. This would have made it possible to create a proper Japanese-language email template. Whether Jetstar failed to do this out of ignorance or cheapness (not wanting to incur the development costs), it's still a localization fail.

Let me illustrate with three cases I know of in Japanese.

Pancake

The Japanese for this is パンケーキ (pankeeki), which most Japanese I've spoken to mistakenly believe is a combination of the words パン (pan — "bread") and ケーキ (keeki — "cake"). This is wrong, because pancakes are called pancakes because they're cooked in a pan, but it also makes sense, because like bread, pancakes aren't sweet, and you put butter and something sweet on them.

パン (pan) is, incidentally, a loanword from Portuguese "pão."

Pan Pizza

The Japanese for this is パンピザ (pan piza). This case is similar to pancakes, above. In this case, most Japanese I've spoken to assume it's called "pan pizza" because the thick crust is like bread.

Flea Market

The Japanese for this is フリーマーケット (furii maaketto). Most Japanese I've spoken to assume it's composed of the words フリー (furii — "free," as in independent) and マーケット (maaketto –"market"). So it's a place where vendors are independent, paying a fee for a space in which to sell their wares.

There is actually a term in Japanese, のみの市 (nomi no ichi), which is a literal translation of "flea market." Not many Japanese people seem to make the connection between the two, however.

Probably the worst offender is the 文部科学省, which has the quite unwieldy official translation of Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology. This is a real pain when you're constrained for space, such as when translating a table or PowerPoint presentation. At least the abbreviation is a tidy four-letter "MEXT."

Perhaps a bit less drastic is the 郵政研究所, literally the "postal policy research institute." They slipped a trendy "telecommunications" into the English translation: "Institute for Posts and Telecommunications Policy."

Another example is the 国土交通省. Literally, it's the "ministry of land and transport," but the English translation is "Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport." The MLIT was created by merging the old Ministry of Transport and Ministry of Construction; my guess is that the MOC people were upset about losing any mention of "construction" in the Japanese name, so stuck the far more trendy "infrastructure" into the English translation as a face-saving measure.

Land grab?

The MEXT started life as the 文部省, with a nice, pithy English translation of "Ministry of Education." One can only imagine the backroom deals and lavish foreign junkets overseas fact-finding missions that went into getting a 科学 (Science) tacked onto them.

Since the ministry pretty much controls its own English translation, it looks like the MEXT really let their territory-coveting hair down when coming up with the English name. I'm actually surprised that they didn't simply call themselves the Ministry of Life, the Universe, and Everything.

Example of restraint

A good example of restraint is the 総務省, literally the "general affairs ministry." In 2001, it changed its official translation from Ministry of Public Management, Home Affairs, Posts and Telecommunications to Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications. Still more of a mouthful than the Japanese, but it's heading in the right direction.

At least some agencies get it

Of course, not all English translations of Japanese government agency names are tales of woe. A good example is the 海上保安庁, which recently changed its official translation from the somewhat cryptic Maritime Safety Agency to the much more understandable Japan Coast Guard. In this case I suspect they simply gave in to pressure, since most English-speaking media referred to them as the Coast Guard anyway, and even 海上保安庁 people usually called themselves the Japanese Coast Guard when dealing with foreign entities.

And now for something completely different

While researching this post, I noticed that Kenkyusha's Reader's Plus dictionary has a translation for "Ministry of Silly Walks": ばかあるき省.

The Fifth Edition of the Green Goddess gives the following translation for 画面 in a computer context:

【電算】 〔コンピューターや携帯電話などの表示面〕 a (display) screen.

This, unfortunately, is incorrect for most of the cases where the word 画面 is used in the wild.

The Microsoft Manual of Style for Technical Publications says that the term screen refers to "…the graphical portion of a visual output device" (i.e. the monitor's display area). In most of the cases where I see 画面, however, it's being used for one of these other meanings.

For example, this page has the following text:

ホームページ閲覧中に「セキュリティ警告」画面が表示されます

This, of course, is referring to the "Security Warning" dialog box that appears when the page tries to install software on your computer.

Here's another example, where a login page calls itself a
ログイン画面.

And a final example, where the main window is called the
メイン画面.

Conclusion

What all this boils down to is that you can't translate the term 画面 mechanically. You've got to look at the context, and see how the word's being used. Gee, you mean we've got to pay attention to context in software translation too? I thought this was supposed to be easy!