Blog in English

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Here are some thoughts to share from the daily life of a translator...

運営しているクリエイター: Translation Service S. Arai

#literature

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

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

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

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

Need a good advocate for the Nobel Prize?

Congrats to Abdulrazak Gurnah, Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature 2021! And condolences to millions of Harukists who believed that the prize this year would go to their favourite Japanese author, Haruki Murakami. It is a well-known f