The Japanese language is known for its heavy omission of all sorts of words when they can be inferred from context: objects, subjects, and even particles (tiny words that act as grammatical glue in a way similar to prepositions). Even simple everyday sentences like “食べた” (“I ate it”) can have multiple omissions (in that case,… Read More »
I’m proud to announce the release of a new translation of two of Kyusaku Yumeno’s works, published in both English-only and parallel Japanese/English formats.
When exploring the spacious Kinokuniya in download Portland the other day, I couldn’t decide what to buy so I ended up picking up on a whim the first episode of “Oyasumi Punpun” by Inio Asano. It has a pretty simple cover that is pure yellow, except for an embossed image on the front that I… Read More »
Musings and hints on the difficulties of learning conversation in a foreign language, inspired by a twitter post of someone who was struggling to learn conversation in Japanese without a teacher.
I’m pleased to announce the release of a book of short stories by classic author Kyusaku Yumeno, with stories listed in both English-only and Japanese/English parallel formats. Over 60 translation notes are included to give a deeper understanding of the original text.
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 »