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.

Apparently there’s now a DVD on the market that enables Japanese males to realise their dreams of scoring with blondes by teaching them certain choice phrases, according to the latest WaiWai (where else?).

Japanese men seeking knowledge of how to ask gaijin women for oral sex in the street in English can gain this for a mere Y19,400 for the two DVD set.

My favourite ever story of a drunken Japanese male approaching a fair-haired female former colleague of mine in a gaikokujin bar was his immortal line of “My dick is small, but very hard.”

Maybe the DVD isn’t such a bad idea, after all.

I previously wrote about the rising western media perception of the otaku as somehow symbolic of Japanese males in 2006. I visited my first maid cafe in Akihabara recently and was slightly underwhelmed at the experience (there were families in there). Even the vacuous quarters of Dazed and Confused magazine (which entirely lives up to the latter part of its name) have cottoned on to the phenomenon, getting their Tokyo correspondent to hugely miss the point in the process.

No, as I’ve also said here before, if you want to experience Japanese subculture full-on in English then check out the latest offering from Kenji Siratori.

The student government at my junior high school had been putting little postcards with inspirational aphorisms all over the school. Most are broken record variations of “Believe in thyself,” “Reach for the stars,” or something equally hackneyed. Though here’s a thought-provoking one:

jibun ga tatteiru basho o fukaku hore
soko kara kitto izumi ga dettekuru.

Which roughly translates as:

Indeed.

Click here to see a TV commercial for the Sony PSP Talkman, which is a device that you can talk into in one language for instant translation into another language.

In the commercial, a Japanese man in China discovers that the toilet stall he is using is out of toilet paper. He says into his Talkman (in Japanese), “I’m out of toilet paper.” The Talkman translates this to Chinese, and then. . .

Via Watashi To Tokyo

Here are some photos you can use for reference for haniwa rukku (haniwa look), which is one of the trendy new geek terms referred to Danny Bloom’s article here.

This is a haniwa.

This is haniwa rukku.

Friday is a weekly gossip and news magazine published in Tokyo, with a nationwide readership in the millions. In a recent summary of its latest issue, longtime American expat Mark Schreiber writes in the Japan Times that there are a bunch of new geek terms in Japanese gaining popularity, noting that: “Otaku [geeks] have become plentiful in Japan and it seems they are fast developing a language of their own. To penetrate this linguistic barrier, Friday provides readers with a useful lexicon of current otaku jargon.”

Geeks, as is well known, seem to take delight in overdosing on “cute.” So let’s say you’re walking down Center-gai, the main drag in Tokyo’s funky Shibuya district, and you see one, or several, gals prancing down the street in plush pajamas that make them resemble the Pocket Monster Pikachu on steroids. A normal person might say, “That’s weird.” But you, as a bona fide otaku, immediately recognize this charming young person as being a kigurumin. The word is a composite from kigurumi pajama, sleeping wear resembling a stuffed toy or cartoon character. By adding an “n” at the end, it becomes min — a suffix found in kokumin (citizen). So that gives you kigurumin — the tribe of people who wear cutesie pajamas on the street.

Isn’t this fun?

Another new term is terawarosu, meaning a belly laugh. In proper Japanese, to laugh is warau. But when a Japanese in a blog or chatroom wants to show he finds something to be hilarious, he types warosu, the Net equivalent of “LOL (laughs out loud).”

“Tera” is from terabyte (1 trillion bytes), the next step up in data volume after “giga” (1 billion bytes). So terawarosu — and it’s a real mouthful — would be like the English “ROTFL (rolling on the floor laughing).”

Some of the numerous examples in Friday’s selection included the following:

• Bonsai — no connection with dwarf pines, this means a motorcycle or a car festooned with accessories or ornamentation.
• Chinsodan — an alternate word for bosozoku (hot-rod gangs). Literally means “weird running group,” and serves as a putdown, since many young people regard the term bosozoku (”violent running tribe”) in a positive light.
• Dentotsu — an abbreviation of denwa totsugeki shuzai — to attack by telephone. This means to inundate a company or organization by telephone with complaints or requests for information.
• DQN — pronounced do-kyun. It’s an abbreviation of mokugeki dokyun. Used when a bad guy makes the scene, as in “Uh-oh, here comes trouble!”
• Hesoten — laid-back, secure, happy. Literally means sprawled on one’s back with one’s belly-button pointing skyward.
• Haniwa rukku — High-school girls, particularly in northeast Japan, have taken to wearing sweat pants under their short uniform skirts to discourage the ubiquitous camera peepers. By so doing, they resemble the garments on haniwa, the clay figures placed around prehistoric grave mounds.
• Nichannera — someone who frequently puts posts on Ni-channel, one of Japan’s most popular blogs.
• Nonai kanojo — literally “brain-inside girlfriend.” It means the girl of one’s fantasies — a virtual partner who does not actually exist. The opposite would be riaru (real) kanojo.
• Ookina otomodachi — on TV shows and at public events, the MC calls children otomodachi (friends). So adults become ookina (big) otomodachi.
• Shiroi iyahon — white earphones. Used to refer to a person with an iPod.

Reuters and the United Press are reporting Japan’s Ministry of Foreign affairs will post translated versions of “Japan’s controversial new history textbook” on its website in order to “promote better understanding”. The textbooks have already been translated in Korean and Chinese, and an English version will follow. A complete news release can be found here, and the textbooks themselves will be posted here.

At a news conference, the foreign ministry’s new deputy press secretary (a former journalist who’s been a “bureaucrat for less than a month“), Tomohiko Taniguchi said:

Neighboring countries have begun to have increased interest in the content of the history textbooks used in Japanese junior high schools. Much of the discussion heard from these countries, however, is not based on accurate understanding of Japan’s history textbooks. Publication under this project is intended to promote understanding by foreign countries of the real picture of Japan’s history textbooks and history education, by introducing in translation what is actually written in its junior high school textbooks.

Based on the stories by UP and Reuters, it would seem to be unclear why the foreign ministry is deciding to do this; as Japundit, in a (much) earlier post, already noted, the disputed textbooks are already available online at the Tsukurukai site, in Korean, in mainland and traditional Chinese, and in English(pdf).

Although it seems as though the eight books were all written by the Society for Textbook Reform, probably what Reuters and the United Press meant to say was that the Japanese foreign ministry will post all eight books the education ministry has approved for use in junior high schools in Japan.

Just one of these books includes the controversial Tsukurukai textbook that has caused Japan such problems in Asia (and has been adopted by two only two school boards to date), so it’s probably fair to say that the goal of posting the translations is to show people that the textbooks commonly taught in junior high schools are so unreadable that it’s a wonder how any Japanese kid ever learns anything at all present a more balanced view of history that acknowledges the country’s past history of militarism.

The one question neither Reuters nor UP seems to be asking is why the foreign ministry is posting educational curriculum, rather than the Japanese education ministry. The Ministry of Education isn’t even mentioned in the press release, which seems to go against protocol. Perhaps the foreign ministry web servers are more robust in the event of a DOS attack…

Taiwan Professor S. H. Chang is a Yiddish specialist at Wenzao Ursuline College of Languages in southern Taiwan, and she’s one of a kind. After all, you don’t find many Chinese academics on Taiwan studying and writing about Yiddish.

Chang, a soft-spoken Taiwanese woman in her early 30s who has written about and researched the Yiddish language (and speaks it as well) is one of the few Yiddish philologists in the Chinese-speaking world. She heads the department of German at the Taiwan college in the subtropical, southern part of the island nation of 23 million Buddhists and Taoists.

“When I set about learning Yiddish, I was merely opening up a new door for myself,” the professor says. With a doctorate from Germany’s Trier University under her belt, Chang has gained world renown as an expert in German and Jewish literature, delivering academic papers around the world. In addition, she’s become a Jewish historian for the Chinese and Taiwanese people, as well as a philologist of German and Yiddish.

Chang admitted in a recent telephone interview with this blogger that learning Yiddish did not come easy at first, although she said that the fact that the “language of Jewish exiles” contains around 85 percent German morphemes made it easier as time went by, since she had already mastered German as a university student in Taiwan and Europe. In addition, she speaks Chinese, Taiwanese and English.

Is Profesor Chang aiming to be the Leo Rosten of the Chinese-speaking world, perhaps? She plans to write a book someday - in Chinese, of course - for the reading public in Taiwan, explaining the nuances of Yiddishkeit and the history of the Jewish disapora - and meaning of such words as kvell, chutzpah and nachos, she said. The Chinese people have had their own disapora, too, so the two cultures, Jewish and Chinese, have many similarities.

Danny Bloom, in Taiwan

Westerners, and Americans in particular, have long enshrined the private detective in a niche of the popular culture. The private eye has long been a staple in fiction, film, and television, going back at least to Sam Spade/Bogart and continuing to the present.

The image of detectives is not so romantic in Japan, however, as this article in the Japan Times explains. The first problem is that the country lacks a licensing system such as those in the United States and other countries. (Fans know that classic detective fiction frequently leans on a plot structure in which the detective runs the risk of physical danger from the bad guys, so for protection has to take action that could get his license revoked.)

Since there is no licensing requirement for Japanese gumshoes, anyone can get into the game—even the yakuza. Complaints to consumer organizations about the shady ops are rising, including dicks who don’t do any work at all yet still demand high fees, or investigators who blackmail their clients with the information they uncover. In fact, the government is not sure how many private detectives are working in the country today. An estimated 5,110 companies are in the business, but that is based on surveys of phone books and street signboards.

Some members of the ruling coalition, including the LDP and New Komeito, are preparing legislation that would institute a licensing system to weed out the unsavory types. The new law also would require that detectives destroy documents and data gathered in the course of business once they wrap up investigations for their clients.

The primary demand for private detectives in Japan is to check into extramarital affairs. (That’s how Jack Nicholson made a living in Chinatown.) I’d guess that background checks of prospective marital partners run a close second. Some people still don’t want any Korean, burakumin, or Ainu blood in the family line, though their numbers are dwindling.

One of my Japanese teachers at university told us a story of her experiences with a private detective. She came from a somewhat prominent family—after graduation, she worked in the Foreign Ministry and traveled with friends overseas, which was a very big deal in the early 60s. (There were restrictions on overseas travel until 1964.) She met and planned to marry an American doctor, so her family hired a detective firm to do a background search on her beau.

She told us about the agency’s performance one day in class. “The agency reported only that he would probably have a good income because he was a doctor,” she laughed. “What a waste of time! We knew that already.”

I almost forgot—one detective novelist does sell very well in Japan, and in fact won the Naoki Prize for fiction about 15 years ago. That is Ryo Hara, whose books are very readable. In a lucky break, I got to read his books while getting paid for it. His publisher hired me to translate excerpts of his fiction into English and write summaries of his novels to pitch them overseas, They weren’t very successful, which is a shame, because the books are good (though a little Chandler-ish for my taste). The best they could do was sell my translation of one of his short stories to a French publishing company, who based their French translation on my English translation instead of the original Japanese. (Not a good idea for producing a faithful translation.) Maybe Hara needed a better translator!

If you want to have some fun with machine translation, click over to Lost In Translation, where you can have your English Babel-ized by translation back and forth between five languages, and finally back into English.

Babel-izing the following sentence:

“When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s amore”

Produces:

“If the moon fixes its eye like a great vector of Fleischpie of the vector of Pizzapie, is the lover.”

Are you listening Monty Python?