Translation

For the past month or so, I've been translating the ruby language designer Matz's blog. It has been an interesting project, good for my Japanese, and I feel like I'm getting to understand Matz a little better.

A lot of his blog centers around his itinerary. He writes about how busy he is, who he meets and what events he attends. But a few posts so far that have stood out for me are below.

He had one about taking his kids to Vogel Park, which is apparently full of flowers and birds. It sounds like a really cool place, and next time I'm in Japan, I really want to check it out.

In another family related post, he talks about a nice thing that his daughters did on his wedding anniversary. Basically, following the model of a children's book that they had read, they made a scavenger hunt for their parents with a homemade pastry at the end.

In another post, he describes his use of "Nice Try" at RubyConf which was directed at the Rubinius project. At the time, he did not realize the cocky, sarcastic connotation (totally the opposite of his personality) of the phrase, so he was surprised when people laughed.
He posted in English and Japanese to explain this one.

I have definitely found an all new respect for professional translators. There are so many challenges and decisions with going from Japanese into English. Here's a list of what I've run into so far:

1. Missing gender information- Suzuki-san is less descriptive than Mr. Suzuki. So I either have to guess or find out by other means. Also, in general, Japanese refers to people by gender (she, her) less often than English.

2. Place/City/Company names- These aren't in the dictionary. Something like "Vogel Park" was easy enough to sort out with a google search. The name of some restaurant in Sapporo is a little harder to figure out.

3. Readings for names of people/places- There are some conventions for this, but it can also be irregular. If someone is particularly famous, a biography will probably spell out the reading though.

4. Too much indication of the ambiguity of the situation- It seems like there are a hundred ways to indicate "I wonder/maybe/possibly" in Japanese. But unlike English, it apparently is A-OK to mix them all together. There is so much wishy-washiness in Japanese that if you really wrote all of it down it you would end up with things like, "What should I do, I wonder..."

5. Missing subjects- AGH! These are all the same in Japanese:
What should I do? What should you do? What should we do? What should they do? What should he do? What should she do? What should be done?

6. Caveman-ness- There are occasions when we leave off certain things. Sometimes in a list- "Buy milk. Feed cat. etc." But partly due to subject dropping, it's hard to tell where this begins in Japanese. If there is no verb or copula at the end, then what gets cut in the sentence? There's already almost a guarantee to be no subject in the Japanese, but do you put it back in?

7. Voice- Character is a difficult thing to get right. What may sound playful in one language, might sound silly or aggressive in another. And how do you decide when to pull out the big words? Matz seems to be friendly, warm and accessible. I can't help but worry that after I translate him, he sounds too much like me though. Would he use all of the contractions, "really"s, and "a lot"s that I have him saying? I'm not sure. Also, he's undoubtedly very smart, but I feel like my translations don't necessarily reflect that. Distinguishing scholarly from common Japanese must be a product of a great deal of context and experience that I don't have to draw on.

8. Politeness- Although it's thought to be one of the major differences between English and Japanese, luckily, I don't really have to deal with it much. He may describe conversations, but so far I have come across little to no quoting of them.