I translated the second part of Kenji Miyazawa’s famous story “Matasaburo of the Wind”, which happens to be the same story referred to in the song “Matasaburo” by the rock band Yorushika.
This is the first post of a new series about dealing with common problems experienced in Japanese to English translation. This time I go over some approaches to translating adjectival clauses, which can be tricky due to differences between the grammar in these two languages.
Understanding jokes and other forms of comedy in a foreign language can be a difficult undertaking for language learners. To begin with, comedic wordplay based on homonyms (two words with the same sound but different meaning) is often used and may involve subtle aspects of pronunciation (intonation, etc.) Pop culture references are also abundant, including… Read More »
I’ve translated over ten stories by Juza Unno (海野十三), an important figure in Japanese science fiction (which you can find in both E-book and paper book form here), probably more stories than I’ve translated by any other author. One of my goals in publishing these stories was to allow English speakers around the world to… Read More »
As I confirmed myself a few years ago, Japanese has a large number of homonyms––words that have the same sound but different meanings. Personally I’m divided on the efficacy of teaching the various meanings of a single word together, since it can confuse language learners, but sometimes it can be good to know all the… Read More »
I’m proud to announce my latest book release, a trio of SF fiction stories by Japanese classic author Ikujiro Ran.
In this post I give a list of words which contain kanji not commonly used in modern Japanese anymore, as a way to help those wanting to get into reading classical literature that is 50+ years old.
In this post I talk about some pros and cons of bilingual education programs for children, based on some data I have gathered over the last few years.
In this post I talk about something I’ve experienced in my Ki-Aikido training: the idea of being able to learn from others, regardless of their level.
In this post I will go over the expression “〜からすると” (~kara suru to), including a few examples and related expressions. To start the discussion, let’s look at a concrete example sentence. 色からするとかなり古いだろうね。 (iro kara suru to kanari furui darou ne.) Now let’s look at each piece of the phrase “kara suru to”: から (kara): A… Read More »