南向き翻訳事務所 岩渕デボラ ブログ

I stumbled onto the Kodansha International editor’s blog and found some fun postings about two upcoming cookbooks that we have been “involved” with.

One is by Tamako Sakamoto who writes the “A Taste of Home” column for the Daily Yomiuri (my involvement is that I am a long-time fan of hers.) Here is the blog posting by the book editor, and it has lots of photos of Ms. Sakamoto’s large family. The book will be out early next year.

The other book is by popular Japanese vegetarian cook and blogger izumirun. Her latest, The Vegetable Sushi Cookbook  is going to be published in both Japanese and English. Get a whiff of the work on the book here, and visit izumirun’s Japanese blog here.

This morning I went to the Maebashi tax office to get some extra forms for paying the taxes on payments to people I have hired to work for me.

Could this be a sign of an improving economy?

前橋税務署で（自分以外の）翻訳仕事で生じた所得税の支払いに必要な書類をもらいに行きました。すっきりなくなったので。

これって、経済浮き上がりの印でしょうか？

It has been a long, busy autumn. We finally decided to take a break and went to Nagano. Usually, we here at Minamimuki are diehard Toyoko Inn people. We know what we’re getting and we do not pay much for it. As a treat, though, we wanted to go somewhere nice. (Our idea of “nice” is just a little more expensive than Toyoko Inn.)

What we came up with was a walk around Ikenodaira not far from the Komoro exit on the Shinetsu Expressway.  We went up above the deserted ski area (no snow yet) and took a walk around the “Ikenodaira Swamp.” I would have translated that one “marsh” myself, and even marsh was pushing it in terms of water, BUT we got a spectacular view of Mt. Fuji. Mt. Fuji from Nagano. Now that was “nice!”

From there, we drove another 15 minutes to our inn for the evening, Tokiwakan. You must check out this link. We drove ten minutes up a mountain covered in terraced fields. We barely avoided hitting an older couple who stopped their little truck in front of us and began opening the doors to get out as we, at the same time, tried to pass them. In other words, it was not a high traffic area. But there at the top of the hill was the Tokiwakan. It was a lovely place full of some of the most congenial staff I’ve met in Japan. The room was lovely, the mountain-top bath (you take a little trolley straight up to get to it) was cozy and well-tended and had a beautiful view. And the food was excellent–freshly made tempura, simmered carp, homemade ice cream and other goodies for dinner, and the usual hotel smorgasbord for breakfast, but nicer (eggs cooked while you wait) and COFFEE.

I hate to say it, but it was worth what we paid for it (which wasn’t all that much in the world of fancy hotels in Japan). In a world with a poor economy and a lack of imagination, Tokiwakan  has used its resources to create a wonderful getaway. After all my years in marketing research, I got the distinct impression that the owners pinpointed exactly what customers wanted and figured out to provide it without going bankrupt or charging a fortune. I can’t describe all the details–just go and have a nice time!

Yesterday was the 6th anniversary of this company. As usual, I completely forgot, but someone remembered and brought home a bouquet of roses!

The “translation economy” began sliding just  about in 2004, so it’s good to still be here. Here’s to a fantastic 7th year!

南向き翻訳事務所設立6周年を迎えました。難しい経済状況で「までやってるよ！」と言えるだけでも幸せです。皆さんと共に活躍ができて、素敵な7年目になりますように！

I have the day to myself. I can work flat out from dawn till the middle of the night (OK, maybe 6:30). Everything will get done, and it will be done well and quickly!

Not.

Ideally, a long work day will be broken up by a walk to the bank or the mall to buy things we actually need, or even a trip to the gym!

Unideally, I will be unable to unglue myself from my computer and will need computer-related breaks. I have some favorites that I’d like to share–presented in order of “apparent intellectual worth.” (I made up this term after many long days decoding books on psychiatry that use a lot of similar sorts of terms.)

No. 1 “Abstract City” by Christoph Niemann. Intellectual by virtue of being from the New York Times. You can learn a lot from this guy, be totally entertained and never feel you are wasting time.  After going through his pieces (and you will), it becomes apparent that Niemann is a househusband of sorts, and gets a lot of inspiration from his three sons–all of whom have first initials corresponding to the New York subway system.

No. 2 Free Rice, a blog-cum-game that makes you learn hard words and somehow convinces you you are doing something good. To date I have never used any of the words I have picked up on this game. It is low on the fun factor, but high on addictiveness–and you feel kind of guilty if you give up too soon.

No. 3 Awkward Family Photos.com  OK, this takes a really big dive in terms of intellectual index, but the headings are very clever, and sometimes you just need to laugh until you cry.

No. 4 I Can Has  Cheeseburger Intellectual value: -5. Got an hour before dinner, it’s too dark to take a walk, your brain is too fried to work? Enter this site and sample some of the many, many categories that will keep you in cyberspace for eternity. I personally like FAIL Blog because you just can’t watch too many car wrecks or see too many kids riding their bicycles into things.When you’re done with all the categories on the top of the page, scroll all the way down to the bottom for many, many more. (Wedinator, a good choice!)

There are a few blogs I enjoy reading, but lately I feel like I’m missing out because I’m being invited to “follow me on Twitter,” which is apparently something else. So there are blogs and twitters and there must be some other things, too, because blogs have all kinds of other icons suggesting other dimensions of cyberspace. But somehow “following” suggests more energy than I have to spend, and I have so far declined the kind invitations.

Back to work!

There are lots of Japanese words I just plain don’t like. Many of them are related to children and learning and schools, so I haven’t had as much contact with them workwise as mothering-wise. The end result being that I don’t think about them so much as rebel against (and complain about) them.

I recently had work-related contact with one of my least favorite phrases: 集団生活 shuudan seikatsu, literally “life in a group.”  Many mothers use it as a reason for putting their children into preschool as soon as they are eligible–they want the kids to get used to shuudan seikatsu early on.  (My daughters went to preschool the instant they were old enough, but it was because I wanted someone else to play with them for part of the day!)

Anyway, shuudan seikatsu has been stuck in my craw for years–and I never understood exactly why until a few days ago when the word came up in an editing job. The translator had written about the notion of a five-year-old being “adapted for communal life.” I checked the original Japanese, and sure enough, there it was–”able to deal with shuudan seikatsu.”  This was the aha moment!

I grew up in the 60s and 70s–during the glory days of, well, communal life in the United States. Although I never lived in a commune, I was on the fringes for several years and saw many people I loved and respected heading in that direction. Somehow, though, the notion of being unable to personally own anything was more than I could deal with. I had a good bike, a nice flute, the typewriter my dad took to college, and a few hundred dollars in the bank. The possibility of signing away even those was just too depressing.

So that was it!  My brain read shuudan seikatsu as “communal life,” and I was  terrified of the notion that my children, my only blood relatives on this side of the Pacific, would be ripped from my arms, and I would never see them except for short vacations in the summer or maybe at New Years. They would belong to someone else.

After years of living in the shadow of this menacing image, I could finally kill it off–and in plenty of time to apply it to any possible grandchildren. I carefully crossed out  “adapted for communal life” and wrote in “capable of participating fully in group activities.”

Done!

The Onion, a daily online newspaper, recently published an article entitled, “New Six Flags Ride Based on Relationship with Deborah.”

I think the 75% of baby-boomer women who share my name will agree–The Onion (which is well known for playing fast and loose with the facts anyway) needs to change the name in that article to one more suitable to the thirty-ish picture on that New Six Flags Ride photo. I’m thinking Tiffany or Heather.

Nobuko Takagi has won the 36th Kawabata Yasunari Literature Award for Short Stories. The winning story was “Tomosui,” a tale set in the Philippines, written as a part of her Soaked In Asia project, and first published in Shincho magazine, April 2009.

Read the English version (by Deborah Iwabuchi) on Ms. Takagi’s blog.

My husband was delighted (perhaps for my sake) to hear that “Bones” substituted “translation” for “murder” (see previous posting).  He said the Japanese sub-titles used the word henkan, which means a kind of transformation. And that makes much more sense, of course.

Pamela,  a fount of knowledge and intuition, has declared that the original script had certainly called for Booth to ask Brennan not to use the word “murder” at the funeral and replace it with the word “transition.” BUT during rehearsals, one of the actors–most likely David Boreanaz, who plays FBI Agent Seeley Booth, MUST have said “translation” instead of “transition,” at which point the entire cast collapsed in laughter and they decided to leave it in.

If this is the case, my philosophical questions have gone to waste. It’s a dark day for my honorable profession, but definitely a brighter one for script writers.