In our trip to Japan this year, we visited many bookstores throughout the country. I love Japanese bookstores not only because I can see what is popular in literary Japan, but also because it’s fun to read the covers and backs of a bunch of books and figure out what type of book each is.… Read More »
A few weeks back when I had written an article about translation, someone had posted a comment about the site Gengo.com, which is a web-based human translation service. “Gengo” (言語) means “language” in Japanese, and the company is in fact located in Tokyo. The concept of the site is pretty straightforward: Those who need text translated can work… Read More »
Very early on in my studies of Japanese, the idea of translation from Japanese to English popped into my mind. Many times, it would appear as a watchdog, a double check on my understanding. For instance, if I just glazed over a passage which had a few words I didn’t understand, I’d say to myself… Read More »
For some time now, I’ve been thinking of getting into Japanese to English translation more seriously. I’ve just finished the novel “Candy Candy Final Story” by Keiko Nagita, and when I discovered there was no official English translation (and no unofficial one I could find), I realized it was the perfect opportunity for me to… Read More »
“Candy Candy” is a Japanese historical Shoujo (girls) manga written by Keiko Nagita (名木田 恵子) which was originally published in the magazine “Nakayoshi” serially from 1975 to 1979. It was quite popular, and spawned an anime, theatrical show, and several novels. To give an idea of the popularity, around 12 million copies were printed in total for the… Read More »
The other day I was reading some posts about Japanese on Twitter and came across a post that had a simple phrase written in English, and then translated into Japanese. Here is what it said: Hey, did you lose weight? あれ？やせた？ [Are? Yaseta?] At first, this looks like a pretty innocuous phrase. Both the English… Read More »
In a recent post of mine about suggestions for increasing reading speed in a foreign language, a reader commented about how using parallel texts in two languages (your native language and the one you are studying) is another helpful technique. Surely, using parallel texts is a valuable tool, and it’s pretty easy to do this by… Read More »
I have an interest in learning the origins of various Japanese words, which is funny since I couldn’t care less for the origins of words in my native language, English. I don’t think it’s for the sake of history, since memorizing arbitrary facts puts me to sleep, and it’s not for utility since the origin… Read More »
One of my interests is following the progression of automated translation technologies, and I’ve blogged on this subject before. Recently I started getting into Twitter and realized they have an automated translation feature. I’m not sure what engine is used but I decided to do a quick test and translate one of my posts (Update: it… Read More »
While I do enjoy reading Japanese manga (comics) occassionally, I’ve spent a much greater proportion of my time either watching Japanese anime or reading novels. When I was young I wasn’t really into comic books at all, and as a result it takes me extra effort to follow and appreciate them. When I first started… Read More »