南向き翻訳事務所 岩渕デボラ ブログ

Every few years I have the urge to check up on Frederik Schodt who translated Four Immigrants by Henry Kiyama. The story is of turn-of-the-century Japanese immigrants in the US, something that there is very little documentation of, AND it is a comic book. Fun and educational. Kiyama wrote it in a combination of  Japanese-meant-to-be-Japanese and Japanese-meant-to-be English. This is actually rather easy to accomplish in Japanese. English is a little trickier though, and the translation is very cleverly executed so you can tell which is supposed to be which.

It had been a while, so I decided it was time to see what ol’ Fred was up to. I came upon a page on his website entitled My College Paper. Unfortunately the links to the paper didn’t work for me, but his description of his life in Tokyo at International Christian University 1970-1972 was deja vu all over again.

My first trip to Japan was in 1973 and I was there in college 1975-76. Close enough. I am now going to officially refer this page to anyone who wonders why I am the way I am. I lived in the old Tokyo Olympic Youth Center in Yoyogi which began the day at 6 a.m. by piping in Grieg’s “Morning” full blast over the loudspeaker system accompanied by a cheery but insistent Ohayo gozaimasu, ohayo gozaimasu! I didn’t share a room with a Communist, but I did share a wall with a young woman who had visitors of all sexual orientations over to spend the night with her. I commuted to school on packed buses with old ladies clearing pathways down the aisle with their lethal umbrellas. And I used plenty of those kumitori-benjo! 30+ years later, my poor husband is tired of having me wax nostalgic over the smell of Japanese public restrooms during the summer–one of my oldest and arguably fondest memories.

My only theory on how it was (and somehow remains) manageable is that life is daunting when you are a teenager no matter where you are–being in a foreign country was no less strange to me than high school in California. Especially in the 1960s-70s in the San Francisco Bay Area. Looking back, Japan was–and still is– just another variety of “different.”

On another note, both of my daughters went to ICU and refused to even contemplate the dorms–which were pretty much unchanged from Fred’s day. The cafeteria, though, was rebuilt last year.

ザスパ草津の試合を久しぶりにでかけたら、ハーフの終わりには「アディショナルタイム」が掲示板にでていました。あれ？ロスタイムはどうしたの、と不思議に思いました。『なるほど英語ライティング』で英語の言い回しはポジティブ(remember me)と対照的には、日本語がネガティブ(don’t forget me)になりがちとの説明があります。サッカー用語が英語ぽく、ネガティブからポジティブの動きがでたのかなと思って、帰ってきたら色々調べました。

やはり、「ロスタイム」は元々日本語 です。しかし、英語はネガティブというより悲惨な言い方、injury time (ケガ時間）だということもわかりました。つまりケガをした選手の様子を見たり、ピッチから運んだりする時間のことをいいます。でもケガがあってもなくても、審判がプレーを止めた時はinjury timeになってしまいます。

というところで、 ニュアンス的には試合時間が勝手に延長された「アディショナルタイム」となりました。

ポジティブすぎる、というのもあるでしょうか。

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!

 友達の青木美由紀さんは最近本を出しました。美由紀さんは日本で一番優しい、そして一番たくましい女性だと私は思っています。彼女はNPO法人シェアで色々な国で仕事をしてきました。中には、南アフリカでエイズ患者のために働きました。（下の写真はジャイカのサイトと美由紀さんの活動日記より。）

その経験をもとに、本にしました。

この本は南アフリカの状況、親をなくした子供達のこと、エイズで病んでいる子供達のこと等、写真と情報がたくさんつまっています。

元サッカー日本代表北澤豪選手の南アフリカでの経験談も本の最初に載っています。本の売り上げの一部はNPO法人シェアによせられるそうですので、是非ご協力をよろしくお願いします。誰でも美由紀さんのような働きはできませんが、本を1冊買って、その働きに協力することはできます！

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!

今時の会議の「議題」がなぜかすべて「レジメ」や「レジュメ」へと変わりました。

レジュメは英語で「履歴書」という意味です。どうやって履歴書が議題になりましたか。いつも不思議で仕方がないけれども、会議となると早く帰りたいので、その場では受け流します。

今週末、目眩で寝込みました。音も光もよくないと、刺激なく、自分でぼんやりと二日間あれこれ考えました。目眩していたのであまり深いことは考えられなかったので、この「レジュメ」の謎に取り組みました。となりでイヤホーンでテレビを見ていた相棒兼看護士にiPhoneで「レジュメ」を 調べるように頼みました。

なんと、元々は英語ではなく、フランス語の「resumé 」です。その意味は「要約」、英語では「summary」です。なるほど！履歴書は人の人生の要約とも言えるし、議題は会議の要約でもあります。

数百年前から20世紀まで、英語圏の人はフランスのことを色々憧れました。教育のある人は格好をつけて、話にも文書にもフランス語をたくさん使いました。つまり、今私を困らせているカタカナ言葉は昔フランス人もきっと英語圏人に対して感じました。 「ちゃんと英語があるのに、なぜフランス語の意味を都合よく変えて使っているんだろう」と思った人がいたにちがいありません。

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.

Here in the hinterlands, we do get US and British shows on cable TV although there is no telling when they were made. We enjoy sorting out the time lines of actors who seemingly star in a number of series all at once. Which came first, “LA Law” or “Law and Order?” At the worst, we just sit and try to figure out what program we’re actually watching.

Back to the topic at hand, the episode of Bones we personally watched last night made a teeny tiny step in my territory. The whole Jeffersonian crew was at a funeral when Temperance Brennan (who has an Asperger-ish knack for speaking her mind without regard for the situation) announces that the deceased did not have a heart attack, but has indeed been murdered. Booth encourages her not to use the word “murder” at a funeral because it would upset everyone. He suggests using a code word–”translation” in its place.

Then, of course, the conversation takes off with emotional expressions of, “We’ve got to do something!  This is definitely a translation!”  and “How are we going to tell the widow that her husband has been translated?”  And so on.

It gave me time to think about my occupation. In this episode, is “translation” a synonym for “murder,” or perhaps an antonym? Previous to writing the script, had there been a discussion of a book that had been murdered in translation? Or was it the most benign verb they could think of to take the place and thus make the script funny?  These are questions I want answers to.

Probably questions only a translator would have.