Whenever I am at around Japanese food products, I always try to read the labels to learn new words, especially since there are many food-specific words and expressions that you won’t normally hear in daily conversation. The other day I was reading the label for a “Butter Soy Sauce” product (バターしょうゆ) and came across some… Read More »
The folks over at Kurodahan Press have been running a yearly translation contest now for some time that typically involves translating a selected text from Japanese to English. The winner receives a monetary prize and I think also gets their story (eventually) published in some form. While I had heard about this contest a while… Read More »
Yeti of Shosetsu Ninja, a blog that reviews Japanese books, has just released a translation of the first part of the fantasy story “Edgelands” (original title さいはての地), originally written by Haruka Asahi (朝陽遥). There is a synopsis of the story on his site, but it is about a boy who decides to travel across a… Read More »
In the process of researching how to obtain official legal permission to translate and publish certain Japanese authors, I discovered the book “文藝年鑑” (bungei nenkan), which can be translated as “Literature Yearbook”. In this post I’d like to review this important reference guide, especially useful to translators and those deeply interested in Japanese literature. (By… Read More »
Loanwords from other countries, called gairaigo (外来語), make up a significant part of the Japanese language, and learning their nuances is a key part of being truly fluent in Japanese. Many of these words, for example seetaa(セーター, meaning “sweater”), are used in a way that is very similar to their original language. However, some loan words have… Read More »
This is my translation of the 8th chapter of a Science Fiction novel about a boy genius who helps develop groundbreaking technologies that change Japan’s society drastically, eventually resulting in the colonization of outer space. I had taken a break from translating this series, but due to popular demand I have decided to translate this chapter… Read More »
In mid-June I released an English translation of the first part of an intriguing Japanese SF novella that I had discovered titled “Two of Six: A Captain’s Dilemma” (Japanese title: “６分の２”), written by Tomohito Moriyama (森山智仁). The story involves a system malfunction on a spaceship requiring evacuation of the humans aboard, but the escape pod… Read More »
Emphasis on manners and politeness is one of the key characteristics of both Japanese culture as well as an integral part of the language itself Beginners generally start with basic phrases like “ありがとう” (arigatou), “ごめん” (gomen), and “どういたしまして” (dou itashimashite), but eventually learn better ways to express themselves in a variety of situations. In this… Read More »
Recently when I was reading a book with explanations of old Japanese (for example a Matsuo Bashō poem from over 300 years ago), I came across the word 超訳 (pronounced ‘chouyaku’). I had never seen this word before, despite having prepared this vocabulary list which included a few terms about translation. While the word was not… Read More »
Recently I released the book “Classic Japanese Fairy Tales”, a set of English translations of several short stories by Mimei Ogawa, one of the founding authors of Japanese children’s literature. (You can find the original release post here, or direct Amazon link here) In this post I’d like to give some information about how I made… Read More »