As you’ve probably already discovered, Japanese has a huge number of loanwords, especially from English––and that number seems to be increasing fast. Fortunately, a majority of these can be guessed from context if you can manage to match them up to their original word by sound. But some of them are hard to guess because… Read More »
Recently I announced the release of my latest ebook, “Tales of the Disturbed”, a collection of short stories I have translated from the classic Japanese author Yoshio Toyoshima (豊島与志雄). As part of the editing process I was reading parts of the stories out loud, and after doing this for a while I realized that it… Read More »
I recently announced my latest ebook “Tales of the Disturbed”, and in this article I’d like to talk a little more about the process involved in producing the book. To be honest, I don’t remember where I first discovered the author Yoshio Toyoshima (豊島与志雄, Japanese wikipedia page). I do know that it took a few… Read More »
In my college years, I used to read a lot of magazines. But I gradually realized that, while entertaining, they often lack much real content and are seriously bloated by ads. I’ll still peruse them now and then when I am relaxing at a bookstore, but it’s usually just for a few minutes and I… Read More »
In a previous article I talked a little about the 2018 Kurodahan translation prize. Today I received an email from someone at Kurodahan saying I didn’t win. As this was my first contest of this type, honestly I was not too surprised about this. However, I was a bit disappointed in the number of “points”… Read More »
I’m very pleased to announce my latest book, “Tales of the Disturbed,” has just been released on Amazon. This book contains my translations of several short stories by the classic Japanese author Yoshio Toyoshima (1890-1955), all which are appearing the first time in English. Whereas my other books have all been about science fiction or… Read More »
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 »