Blog in English

Watch Your Tongue!

💥 Wars, famine, fatal infections … we are witnessing obnoxiously grotesque happenings every day. Human suffering is everywhere. In the media, you tend to hear stale expressions such as ✳ (something) is beyond description, beyond words, ind

A “Big Care” Can Be a Nuisance

Do you know the term “double duty carer“? This term refers to those who care for their aged parents while raising their own children. Child care + nursing care = double duty care In Japanese, we have two different terms for these types of

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 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

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,

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

(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

Reading Between Lines Beyond Grammar Books

Have you ever been confronted with the task of translating #non-native #English? In my long career as a translator, I have come across many English texts in which the German structure in the author’s mind shines through. English tainted

In Memory of the Great "Interpreter" of Japanese Literature to the World

In the beginning was the #translation, and the translation was divine. The career of the legendary Japanologist, #Donald #Keene began in his youth when he found a cheap copy of “The Tale of Genji” (源氏物語) by Murasaki Shikibu, translated into

What Do You Mean by "Words"?

💬 The word count – it’s a basic principle in the world of translation. Ever since the introduction of #CAT #tools in our industry, pricing – as far as I know in Germany – has moved away from line counts of target texts to word counts of so

A Declaration of Love on This Valentin's Day

A declaration of love for the art of writing… Writing is an art. However, this claim is not only reserved for the creativity involved in writing a book. When it comes to translation, the author and reader come from different cultures. Bri

Calling You Names in Japanese

After posting on how to translate the word “you” in the Japanese business world, here I am dealing with different expressions for “you” in #personal #communication in Japanese. An intriguing book by Junko Sakai, “うまれることば、しぬことば” (its titl

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