Category Archives: translation

Interview with pro literature translator Tyran Grillo (Japanese to English)

Recently when I was browsing through articles on WordPress.com with the keyword “Japan”, I came upon a post by Tyran Grillo about the book “Mr. Turtle”, an award-winning science fiction novel by Yusaku Kitano which Tyran himself translated from Japanese to English. Having been interested in translation personally for some time now, especially that of… Read More »

Japanese web novel translation: “Japan: A New Age” by Tasogarenin (黄昏人) [Chapter 5: Junpei Transfers]

This is the 5th chapter of a Japanese Science Fiction web novel about a genius boy who helps develop amazing technologies that change Japan’s society drastically, eventually resulting in the colonization of outer space. You can find the original text for this chapter here. You can see the table of contents for the translated chapters here which includes a… Read More »

Sorry, but (Japanese) translation A.I. is still asleep

Recently someone told me of an article in the New York Times titled “The Great A.I. Awakening”, which talks about how Google Translate has switched over to using an A.I. based system, and the supposed improvements. The beginning of the article talks about Japanese to English translation, and includes several English translations of a passage… Read More »

Japanese web novel translation: “Japan: A New Age” by Tasogarenin (黄昏人) [Chapter 4: Development Begins]

This is the 4th chapter of a Japanese Science Fiction web novel I am translating about a genius boy who develops amazing technology that changes Japan’s society drastically, eventually resulting in the colonization of outer space. You can find the original text for this chapter here. You can see the table of contents for the translated chapters here which includes a… Read More »

Dr. “Birigirl” Tsubota’s personality test

The film “Flying Colors” (ビリギャル), released last year (2015), is about a girl who originally has no friends and horrible grades, but works hard and drastically improves her grades. The film is based on a true story, which is captured in the novel “学年ビリのギャルが1年で偏差値を40上げて慶應大学に現役合格した話” (rough translation: “The story of a last-place girl who raises her grades by… Read More »

Japanese web novel translation: “Japan: A New Age” by Tasogarenin (黄昏人) [Chapter 3: Government Negotiations]

This is the 3rd chapter of a Japanese Science Fiction web novel I am translating about a genius boy who develops amazing technology that changes Japan’s society drastically, eventually resulting in the colonization of outer space. You can find the original text for this chapter here. You can see the table of contents for the translated chapters here which includes a… Read More »

Japanese phrase “mou hitotsu” (もうひとつ)and a brief Murakami translation

Recently I was reading an interesting blog which contains reviews of Japanese books (in English), and I came across an article about the Haruki Murakami (村上春樹) book “After Dark”. While I am not going to go into that book in detail in this post, in the the article I found there was a short passage… Read More »

Japanese web novel translation: “Japan: A New Age” by Tasogarenin (黄昏人) [Chapter 2: Startup]

This is the second chapter of a Japanese Science Fiction web novel I have started translating about a genius boy who develops amazing technology that changes Japan’s society drastically, eventually resulting in the colonization of outer space. You can see the table of contents for this here which includes other chapters. You can find the original text… Read More »

Japanese online novel translation: “Japan: A New Age” by Tasogarenin (黄昏人) [Chapter 1]

My last translation project involved a classic story which was several decades old, but this time I decided to try and tackle something a little more modern from one of my favorite genres. It’s a science fiction novel I found published on the site syosetu.com. I haven’t read the entire thing yet, but from what I’ve seen it’s much more… Read More »