南向き翻訳事務所 岩渕デボラ ブログ

According to Yahoo Real Estate, Tokyo is the second most expensive city in the world, following Luanda, Angola. So you might want to consider that when planning your next vacation. Movies are a little bit cheaper in Luanda, but lunch will set you back considerably.

Thanks to overvaluation of the yen in recent years, Tokyo remains a pricey place to live, followed by Nagoya, Yokohama and Kobe in third, fourth, and fifth places.

Remember the good old days when $1 was 360 yen? Not many people do. Back before the Great Depression, my mother-in-law’s parents immigrated to the US. They farmed in Southern California (Imperial Valley, as far as we can tell), made a little money, moved back to Japan where their funds were worth quite a bit more, and never had to work another day in their lives. (Come to think of it, my mother-in-law and her younger sister were born after their parents had effectively retired.)

Nowadays, I suppose I could dream of doing the opposite. Close up shop in Japan and move back to California; maybe buy a house that has lost half of its value in the past couple of years. I wonder if the Oakland A’s still have Dollar Wednesdays…

Translator and blogger Anne Ishii posted her definition of what translation is all about on her blog “Ill Iterate.”

Her three basic steps of “Tuck” (as in “to tuck in”–I think), “shave,” and finally “dress up,” pretty much describe the process.

I was also delighted to see that she has renamed the profession: I can now proudly call myself a “trannie!”

A couple of weeks ago, I gave my students at GWPU an assignment to  reorganize and rewrite an English press release from a certain publisher, giving them both the Japanese and English versions to work with. Ignoring the fact that only about half the class finished the assignment on time, I was thrilled to see that they produced versions much shorter than the original, with one about a third of the original length.

It was an incredible job of “shaving,” now I’ll have to read it to see if it’s properly “dressed up…”