Blog in English

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

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)

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

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

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

Good Old Provincial Names

Q. Can you tell which region/continent the following 州 refers to? Translating address fields on forms is a classic case of the importance of #localization. If you want to fill in your address on a form in Germany, you’ll find it consists

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

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

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