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The Right Footware for Interperters

Following my New Year’s resolution to hit the road more often as an #interpreter, I bought a new pair of shoes for #business #travel. The picture here shows my purchase – what I call “hybrid” shoes - hybrid because they suit both business

A Biased Way of Reading a Book

On World Book Day, I’d like to write about a book for all book lovers: “The Diary of A Bookseller” by Shuan Bythell (Profile Books Ltd.) I admit that this title is not the latest bestseller, but it certainly hasn’t lost any of its charm.

Deciphering Archaic Texts Full of Katakana

Japanese schoolkids can be envious of European ones when it comes to one thing. Instead of learning only 26 (30 in German) letters of the alphabet, they need to learn three different sets of characters. First they learn Hiragana ひらがな and t

Names are people’s identity

Encouraged by the positive feedback on my recent post in an SNS about hard-to-decipher Japanese names, I would like to explore this subject further. In actual fact, Japanese names aren’t the only ones that are difficult to translate. German

A Mystery of Japanese Names on Birth Certificates

Believe it or not, a birth certificate (family register, Koseki Tohon 戸籍謄本) in Japan does not tell you exactly what the person on the certificate is called. This is due to the fact that most Japanese names are written in Chinese characters

Annoying Homonyms!

Let me write about how annoying #homonyms in the #Japanese language can be. ✅ Case Study The story comes back to my recent interpreting assignment in an industrial context. After weeks of hard work installing and commissioning a machine,

Some Thoughts on International Women's Day

The #translation #industry is one of the few trades to have a reverse #gender #gap. There are more women than men in our industry. The 2022 statistics from the Japan Translation Federation (sorry in Japanese only) also confirm this fact. B

No Pay for No Work !? for Freelancers

As of the coming Sunday, the wine will be flowing at #ProWine 2024, the world’s leading trade fair for wine and spirits in Duesseldorf, Germany. We almost forget that savoring fine drinks together was once a no go. It was only four years

2024 - The Year of Affluence

Today is the fifth (!) Thursday of the month. The calendar seems to be pretty full for February. Yes, 2024 is a #leap #year. It’s called “# Schaltjahr ” in German and “ #閏年 Uru-u-doshi” in Japanese. 閏 consists of Chinese characters for a

The Difficulty of Translating YES and NO into Japanese

Imagine you are translating specification tables containing YES and NO by the dozen. But all you have is an excel file with random entries of terms without any context. 🤷‍♀ Obviously, their straight translations, #はい and #いいえ do not work h

"Country Eggs" and an Egg Cup

An egg cup looks somewhat forlorn among many sake (rice wine) cups in a trinket shop in Japan. Country bumpkins (=Landeier, “country eggs” in German) in my hometown are not familiar with Western egg cups. Hence, this odd souvenir landed up

Pillar - The 1,300 Year-Old Counter Word

A pair of glasses, pants, trousers and scissors… In this context, the word “pair” is a sort of counter word in English. Do you know the counter word for these nouns in Japanese? Answer => They are counted with the word 本 (hon) [although 挺

Watch Out for Fire - Habet acht auf Feuer - 火の用心

Mission Complete! After finishing a week-long #interpreting assignment, I opted for a night stroll through the Old Quarter. A nightwatch in the snowy cityscape greeted me.

(Belated) New Year's Resolution

I spent the holidays at the end of the year in Japan. It was a time for a happy family reunion, rest and recouperation. But it also gave me the opportunity to reflect on myself. Last year marked a big change in my family life. My child mov

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