Tag Archives: translation

Promising Translators 2018 (Japanese Translation Contest): three weeks left

Last week I announced “Promising Translators 2018”, Self Taught Japanese’s first ever translation contest, which involves translating a few pages of Japanese fiction into English. The winner will receive a monetary prize, and there be other prizes given as well. This post is a quick reminder for those who are interested that there are three… Read More »

Japanese Translation Contest Announced: Promising Translators 2018

Update: the contest has been closed to submissions and the winners have been announced. I will likely have another similar contest, so please check back later. If you are interested in future contests, please like or comment this post, or send an email to “selftaughtjapanese.contests [at] gmail.com” about what type of contest you’d like to see.  I’m… Read More »

The making of the English translation of “Eighteen O’Clock Music Bath”

(Update: I have since republished “Eighteen O’Clock Music Bath” in a larger compilation that you can find here.) Recently I published my second eBook (Volume 2 of the “Science: Hopes & Fears” series) which contains my translation of the classic dystopian tale “Eighteen O’Clock Music Bath” (original title: 「十八時の音楽浴」)by Juza Unno (海野十三), who is acknowledged as… Read More »

Japanse novel translation excerpt: “Little Bird”(ことり) by Yoko Ogawa (小川洋子)

Last year I reviewed Yoko Ogawa’s wonderful novel “Little Bird” and at the time I was even considering translating a small portion of the book for translation practice, and to give English-speaking readers a taste for the style of the book. But I got busy with other articles and translation projects, and never got around… Read More »

More thoughts about the story “Five Minutes Won’t Cut It” by Kisaragi Shinichi

In a previous blog post I talked about the story “Five Minutes Won’t Cut It” written by Kisaragi Shin’ichi (如月新一), which is being translated by Yeti of Shousetsu Ninja, a blog where he reviews Japanese novels and sometimes does translations of excerpts. He recently posted the last chapter (Ch 6), and you can find all the… Read More »

Difficulties with publishing a translation of a public domain work on Draft2Digital (and a solution)

Recently in the process of trying to publish my first book across multiple internet bookstores via Draft2Digital I ran into some trouble, and as a result ended up publishing directly via Amazon’s KDP (see here for more details). Things did get resolved with D2D so I wanted to provide an update for anyone who might… Read More »

Juza Unno: Classic Japanese SF author published in English for the first time (reprise)

(Update: I have since republished these stories in a larger compilation that you can find here.) In late October, I announced I was working on a new translation project–after around two years of listing translations on my blog, for the first time I was aiming to publish a translation in a more formal media than… Read More »

Taking translation to the next level: Getting Published

For nearly two years I’ve been involved in a series of hobby translation projects, which I’d estimate to be at least 50 chapters and several hundreds of pages. My purpose for these was to improve my Japanese translation abilities on a variety of authors and genres, and I have been very satisfied with what I’ve… Read More »