Blog in English

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

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

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

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

How kids spend their holiday in Japan Germany

☀️The summer #holidays are fast approaching! Having been raised in #Japan and having raised a child myself in #Germany, I have become aware of the great differences in education between the two countries. One particular thing that appalled

A Metaphor-Ridden Use of Brushes

Brushes were the main writing instrument in Japan for over 1,000 years. Only in last 120 years or so did brushes give way to fountain pens and other Western writing tools, before being taken over by so-called “word processors (ワープロ)” and PC

The Cherry Anniversary Still Remembered

There is a novelist I was infatuated 💓with in my high school days. His name is Osamu Dazai (#太宰治). As I progressed into my late teens, however, I became somewhat hesitant to confess my attachment to his works. A passion for him was—or perha

An Art of Self-Deprecation in Honorific Language

Everything is relative. And that includes the position of your ego (when expressing yourself the first person) in Japanese. As you know, we Japanese are pretty polite as a people and tend to overuse honorific language in our business writin

Happy World Book Day for All Those Supporting the World of Books!

On this World Book Day, let me shed a little light on the copyediting profession. Surely you have heard about “Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen” (by Mary Norris), which was the New York Times bestseller a couple years ago? H

A Single Character Making a Big Difference of Three Months

It is the last day of the year in Japan – not the calendar year but the business/fiscal year (事業年度/会計年度). #年 means “year” but #年度 (Nendo) means business year. A single character 度can make a big difference – 3 months, in fact! If you want

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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