Blog in English｜Translation Service S. Arai

Lady Murasaki Speaking Mandarin and the Language of the Wild East

As a literary enthusiast, I’m somewhat hooked by this year’s Taiga drama by NHK 📺, “Hikaru no Kimi he (#光の君へ / Dear Radiance)” featuring Murasaki Shikbu (紫式部). She wrote the Tale of Genji (源氏物語, Genji Monogatari), the epic 11th-century roma

Website Accessibility .. Narrowly Saved

I was supposed to do a small favour for a client. After receiving our German translations for their website, the client asked me to “take a quick look at some additional texts”. They were navigation texts for enhancing the accessibility for

The End Is The Starting Point

I have a clear vision of the END. And by this I don’t mean Armageddon! I’m talking here about how my end product (= #translation) should look. In a casual chat with colleagues, a dedicated #interpreter once told me that she disliked trans

Colour Names Can Be So Poetic

May is the season of fresh greens. A stroll through the woods at this time of year is bliss! You can bathe in the greenish sunlight that filters through the tender young leaves. (We have a special word for this in Japanese: 木洩れ日, Komorebi)

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

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