So my Japanese roommate and her friend (also Japanese) were browsing through my bookshelf one day, looking at my English language literature, when they stumbled upon an old paperback of Matsuo Basho’s Oku no Hosomichi (Narrow Road). They picked it off the shelf wondering how haiku, something so intimately Japanese, could be translated to English.

After just a few minutes browsing through the pages, my two fluent-in-English friends burst out into laughter. I overheard the uproar in an adjacent room and went over to ask what the fuss was about.. Apparently, the original message was so unbelievably lost in the translation from Japanese to English, they thought it was downright hilarious. They said it was way too modern and conjured up images of Basho wandering the forest with an iPod Nano, mobile phone (with bluetooth headset), and Macbook (which he of course used to write his haiku).

I have decided to take this idea and run with it for haloween. I’m tentatively calling it DJ Basho, and it’s gonna be rad.

More to come.

Being sceptical about the claims made for machine translation seems my default setting now. And as the claims get loftier, so my eyebrows arch that little bit more.

Now NEC Corp has announced that “it has developed an automatic Japanese to English speech translation software tool for mobile phones for Japanese travelers abroad.”

When a user utters a sentence in Japanese, it is displayed on the screen of the cell phone and immediately translated into English, the electronics firm said.

The process of recognizing a Japanese sentence and displaying it on the screen takes about a second and another second or so is required for the English version to be displayed.

The software is equipped with around 50,000 words mainly relevant to tourists.

Voice recognition twinned with machine translation? Sounds like twice the potential for Python-esque disasters (”I will not buy this record, it is scratched.”)

The report goes on to say “NEC expects to develop a handset incorporating the software, which is still at an experimental level.” So I won’t expect the holy grail for Christmas then.

Fuji Xerox has developed a new photocopy machine that reportedly scans the contents of Japanese documents and translates them into Chinese, English, or Korean. Flip a switch and and it translates the other way.

Apparently, the copy machine can be networked to a Fuji Xerox translation server that does the actual brain work.

Though I earn my living as a translator, I have to admit that I still don’t feel very threatened by the current offerings on the machine translation market. I don’t think machine translation will be replacing human Japanese > English translators anytime soon.

Just for fun, since my last two posts complained a bit about automatic translation (which is better than nothing for maybe making sense of an otherwise impenetrable Web site, but still regarded as no good), I tried running some sample text through AltaVista’s notorious Babelfish.

Not content with mere technical text that Babelfish could butcher perhaps semi-accurately (although all those instruction manuals argue otherwise…) I decided to put a haiku through it and see how it would do with that.

It bombed out on a few words in the first few haiku–and strangely these were all Japanese words like keitai, aikidoka, ukemi. I think it must have been working from an English dictionary (duh…)–which is worth remembering, since what should be the easiest terms for Babelfish will be the most impossible for it.

I know there are linguists, translators, and interpreters out there, as well as bilingual types. So, how well do you think it did with this one about capsule hotels:

Saving your money
Buried in a living grave
Missed the train again.

The Japanese becomes:

あなたのお金を救うこと

生きている墓で埋められる

列車を再度逃した。

Running that through Babelfish again to get an English translation of the Japanese it comes up with something I find rather superior to the original–or at least intriguing anyway (although except for the first line the syllables are way off):

Rescue your money

It is buried with the grave which has lived

The train was let escape for the second time.

That is all my original research for today. Although I did run the English haiku through Babelfish once again for the benefit of those of you interested in Hangul. Is the following Korean any good or way off the enlightened and elegant sensibility of the poet’s original?

너의 돈을 저축함

살아있는 무덤안에 매장하는

기차를 다시 놓쳤다.

Disclaimer: It should be emphasized that I am not a lawyer, not a medical doctor, and have no knowledge of the Japanese language. Japundit readers experiencing their unique issues should consult with their own professional translator or interpreter.

* Note:  Title changed from “Le traducteur est un traître” on the advice of Chas. The Italian is shorter and altogether better. Thanks Chas!

POETRY KANTO is currently looking people who would like to try their hand at translating contemporary Japanese poetry and coming up with novel ways of bringing Japanese poetry to the attention of the English-speaking world.

According to Mythic Passages, The Magazine of Imagination . . .

First published in 1968, Poetry Kanto is Japan’s leading bicultural, annual bilingual poetry journal, featuring modern and contemporary Japanese poetry in English translation, as well as exciting contemporary English-language poetry from America, United Kingdom, New Zealand, Japan, etc.

So I was hanging out in Shirakawa when I saw this sign hanging outside a store. I was told it’s a pun of sorts. Any guesses? I’m particularly curious to hear from you translators out there. The answer after the jump.

Akemi Kito and Hiroshi Matsuoka enter a chapel made of ice during their wedding ceremony at the ‘Igloo village’ on Lake Shikaribetsu in Shikaoi town in Japan’s northern island of Hokkaido. Geeze, talk about a cool wedding! That certainly is original. I just hope everyone brought lots of warm undies and hot patches for the ceremony!

Photo courtesy of REUTERS/Yuriko Nakao

I know what I want to be in my next life.

So you live in the US and have heard of this thing called anime. Or, you like anime, but want to know what is out in Japan and current (i.e., not licensed 1+ years after it airs). Then fansubs are what you are looking for.

I love anime. Can’t get enough. How does one feed the habit? The fansubber to the rescue.

A fansubber is a person, or more likely a group of persons, who get a raw copy of an anime episode, OAV (only on video release, i.e., not a movie or televised) or a movie, usually from Japan. Then they get that raw media into an electronic format, create or get a copy of a translation of the Japanese into whatever language they desire, merge the translation into an electronic text file called a subtitle file, then merge the two together. It can be a complicated process and there are many permutations on the finished product (namely final file output, editing, muxing, etc.). See here for a good but simplistic rundown.

A long-time Japundit reader tells us that he and his Japanese girlfriend use web-based translation to communicate with each other by e-mail. Though it generally works pretty well, there are times when it makes the language barrier seem insurmountable.

The following is the translated text our reader received from his girlfriend the other day.

Welcome home. It was able to spend happily, and was good. Please let me hear Chiba’s story later. I fall off the roof, and have a pain in the abdomen a little. However, there is no worry. Your nunchakus cannot be accepted, and it is regrettable for a little while. I think that tomorrow’s party becomes about PM8:00 maybe. Details will E-mail in daytime tomorrow.

When he contacted her to find out how she fell off a roof, she reported that she was trying to tell him that her period had started.

We’ll leave the part about “nunchakus” up to your imagination.