As I gradually hone my translation skills through Gengo.com, I’m learning not just new words in Japanese, but more effective ways of researching word meanings and their proper translations in English. When translating in an environment where conveying the meaning of the original text accurately is critical, there are often cases where only one word or phrase would… Read More »
In early December last year, I wrote a blog entry which contained my personal, unofficial translation of Candy Candy: Final Story‘s prologue that I had worked on in my spare time. Recently, someone nicknamed Beautiful Illusion had discovered my post and written a blog entry discussing it, especially how it has the potential to be an “unbiased translation”.… Read More »
Doing translations between Japanese and English is always an educational endeavor, teaching me so much about Japanese and language in general. One thing that I’ve been thinking about lately is how one can be reasonably skilled in two languages, and yet translating simple phrases can be so challenging. I’ve seen this happen even when I… Read More »
In previous articles here and here, I wrote about the testing process required to become a “Standard” level translator working at the online translation site Gengo.com. Fortunately, I was able to pass the translation test I discussed in the second article, and shortly after I started taking on my own translation jobs during my end-year vacation… Read More »
About a week and a half ago I wrote a blog post about my initial experience with Gengo.com’s contract translation services website. I had failed the 5-question pretest, and had to wait at least three days before I could retake it. So today I decided to retaking it after getting mentally prepared for another hard… Read More »
As part of my training to become a (self taught) Japanese translator, I’ve been doing some unofficial hobby translations from Japanese to English. The first of these was the intro of the most recent Candy Candy novel. For my second translation project, I chose a short story from Endo Shusaku’s “Humorous short story collection” which I reviewed… Read More »
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 »