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Tuesday, June 23rd, 2009
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10:30 am - To Hell With Subtlety; Or, The Fine Art of Wooing While Sleep-Deprived
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| Friday, October 5th, 2007
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8:43 pm - A tale more tragic than mine
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| Monday, June 18th, 2007
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9:39 pm - More vignettes from public school.
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| Friday, June 15th, 2007
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8:00 am - This could have ended like that episode from Cowboy Bebop...
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| Monday, April 23rd, 2007
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5:47 pm - Nugget of Joy: apparently this works for ALL languages...
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So I was having the fourth graders play twenty questions today; one kid thinks of a famous person or anime character and the other kids have to guess who by asking "Is he an athlete?" or "Is she an anime character?" or whatnot. They got a little frustrated by their lack of English vocabulary, and predictably circumvented this by asking questions in Japanese. "Nuh-uh," I said, cutting one kid off. "In English." He scowled, then repeated himself verbatim -- louder, slower, and with a crippling American accent. I was laughing too hard to make him do it again.
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(comment on this)
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| Wednesday, April 18th, 2007
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7:31 pm - Vignettes from a week of public school
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| Saturday, April 14th, 2007
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10:12 pm - Misadventures with the Tinyvan
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| Sunday, April 8th, 2007
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9:26 pm - Behold, I call it the Tinyvan
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( Guess why. )
Other than that I've just been hanging out at my apartment trying to fight off a low-key head cold. It was fine the first few days, but now the chills, body aches, and godawful congestion have finally caught up with me. More annoying than anything else, but it keeps me up at night and I'm using tissues like they're going out of style.
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| Friday, April 6th, 2007
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5:56 pm - A post that's almost work-related
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| Sunday, April 1st, 2007
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11:30 am - More pictures
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| Wednesday, March 28th, 2007
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9:22 pm - Vignettes from S-town
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Went walking around S-town today, but I forgot my map so I opted to stick to the main road. On my walk I encountered no fewer than FIVE hair salons, which is weird, particularly here, because I have yet to see a single person in S-town with fabulous hair. Lots of pubs too, and radish farms. Lots of radishes.
I also came across a flyer that someone had pasted up that read (in Japanese) "There is no God but Christ." I could feel my lip curling involuntarily as I approached it, but when I drew nearer I saw that someone before me had expressed their displeasure with it too, a fine patina of scratches marring the surface. I make no apologies for my hostility toward Christianity, and one of the things that I will forever appreciate about Japan is that they've completely rejected Christianity without replacing it with something worse.
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| Tuesday, March 27th, 2007
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9:14 pm - My home for the next indefinitely
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Training over, they finally kicked us out of Tokyo on Monday morning and sent us to our various destinations accompanied by cheerful Japanese housewives to keep us from getting lost. For the benefit of any wacko stalkers that may read my LJ we'll call the town I've been assigned S-town and the lady who escorted me Tomoko. (I told her I had a friend named Tomoko; she told me that all Tomokos are cheerful; I begged to differ.) First stop was the city hall to get my alien registration card, which was boring but didn't take too long. After lunch we went to drop my stuff off at my apartment, which was larger than I'd been anticipating and quite nice.
( A photo montage of my apartment, behind the fake lj-cut )
Then we went to the cellphone shop, which took for-fucking-ever. Five other Interac people were in the same town, and we all kept turning up at the same places pretty much simultaneously. I, however, was the most decisive so I tended to get things done first: "Which is the cheapest? I'll take that one, please." With difficulty, Tomoko translated as the clerk ran us through the cellphone plan. 980 yen base monthly fee, plus 21 yen per 30 seconds of call time. Twice that if the cellphone I'm calling isn't a SoftBank one. "What about text messaging?" I asked the clerk. 3 yen per message, or free if it's to a SoftBank phone. "So... basically I need to pick my boyfriend based on his cellphone provider?" I asked Tomoko, and from the clerk's snicker she caught that too.
After another hour of waiting, being talked at in Japanese, and signing things I barely understood, I wandered back over to the other guys who were still waiting. "You done?" they asked. "Yes," I said, "but it's going to be another half hour before my phone is ready, so I was going to go buy my futon." "WTF," they said, "Are they assembling it themselves??"
Next we went to the Japanese equivalent of Cole's, ugly brand name stuff at blowout prices, to get a mattress. Tomoko was amused and impressed when I applied the same M.O. to buying housewares. "I'll take that futon, those two pillows, and that towel," I said. "I like shopping with you," she said. As I was checking out, it occurred to me how familiar this whole scene was. There are certain universal truths -- that getting a cellphone will take forever even if you know exactly what you want; that the pretty girls will get the trendy jobs at cellphone boutiques and whatnot; and that the dumpy girls with bad make-up will be the ones working at Cole's and Solo Serve and the dollar stores. Or in this case, Shimamiya and the hyaku-en shops.
Foreigners traveling in Japan always talk about how incredibly different it is, but the fact is that people are people, no matter where you go.
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| Monday, March 26th, 2007
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9:30 pm - Nugget of joy: Interac training
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Working for JET or Interac, you are an Assistant Language Teacher -- emphasis on assistant. So what do you do if the English teacher you're assisting makes a mistake? (And they will, because they are always native Japanese and sometimes rather bad at English.)
The example that Jody, our trainer, gave was I likes fish, writing it on the board in big, legible letters. We're told not to correct the teacher in front of the class, but what do you do when they're about to teach the kids something that is flat-out wrong?
"Aha!" Jody says, striding to the front and wiping out the S. "You can do it that way," he tells the imaginary Japanese class and teacher. "But in conversational English we usually say..."
"Or," he continues, talking to the crowd of Interac trainees again. "My favorite one: 'That's how they say it in AUSTRALIA, but in America...'"
The trainers were a hoot. Interac > JET, even if they are a little disorganized most of the time.
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| Monday, June 19th, 2006
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6:34 am - I staggered out of bed four minutes ago
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...waking up from a bizarre set of dreams that was some big weird Smallville/Deathnote/real life crossover. There was slash, and lots of cats, and Lex torturing robots.
And now I am off to a class on "how to teach English as a second language," as taught by my father. I expect to crash for about four hours once it's over, and then I'll be off to a bartending class in the evening. Both will last two weeks. Then I'm going to go blow all my money in California.
HI ALEXIS!!! SEE U SOON, YA??!
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| Monday, June 12th, 2006
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12:42 am - That is not food
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So I was doing my thing today, as usual, using a combination of Jim Breen's online dictionary, ALC's online example database, and my l33t guessing skillz to bring you only the highest quality translated trash. Oh how I love the example databases--the sentences it produces vary between mundane, bizarre, and outright nonsensical.
> Let's make believe we are ninjas.
> I know that chair is your favorite, but we've talked about this... (Interestingly, in the Japanese sentence that accompanied this, it said nothing about a chair)
> That is not food.
> You should not attach to the standpoint where the person who fluctuates between hopes and fears to superficial things manages the person.
> There are doctors and doctors. (this one pissed me off because it was the exact structure that I was looking for, but the translation was nonsense)
And then today I came across one you might recognize...
> He is not dumb, just lazy. (彼はばかじゃなくて、怠け者なだけだ)
<3
For those who are interested, Jim Breen's WWWJDIC is the dictionary I swear by, and my new best friend Jessica (a translator-at-arms, whom I love more than all of you for SHE KNOWS JAPANESE) pointed me to ALC, which would appear to be Japanese for "space pacman." (Who knows, you can probably find an example sentence that says so. You can find example sentences for anything, it's craaaazy.) Ignore all the text cluttering the page and just put the phrase you want to look up in the input box.
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| Saturday, May 20th, 2006
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10:46 pm - Que sera, sera
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Dear Dennis Nance,
I am writing to decline the position that the JET program has awarded to me. I doubt you will consider my reason ‘just,’ but I was assigned to an extremely remote rural location after having specifically limited the scope of my assignment to urban/suburban on my application. I realize that there is a shortage of applicants willing to work in rural areas and that I will not be offered an alternative post by declining this one, but a village of one thousand in the northernmost tip of Hokkaido is unacceptable.
Thank you for the time and effort that you have put into my application process, and my apologies for any inconvenience that my resignation may cause.
Sincerely,
[real name deleted, because apparently strangers read my lj]
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| Thursday, May 18th, 2006
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11:05 pm - So... the JET thing
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For those of you who haven't talked to me in, oh, ages, here's a brief summary to get you up to speed: I graduated this semester, with the oh-so-useful degree in Japanese. I work for a publishing company in Houston that licenses and translates Japanese gay porn. It's a great job, but only pays like part-time work. Moreover, I'm competent but still really slow. I need to go to Japan and get fluent, which means spending a few years there.
Enter the JET program--sending freshly minted grads overseas to teach English in Japan. JET is what people with a degree in Japanese do for their first year or so out of college, it's so prevalent it's become nearly a cliche. I applied--won an interview in March, drove out to Houston and apparently answered all the questions wrong but still got my secondary acceptance in May. However, it would seem that I answered THE most important question wrong:
Interviewer: It says here that you would prefer an urban placement, but if none are available than you'll take a suburban one? What about a rural placement?
[for the record, those are the three categories that you're allowed to choose between]
Me: .......I wouldn't be happy there.
Apparently I should have said NO. NO, I will not accept placement in a village or an island. Unequivocally, NO. Because today my paperwork from the placement committee arrived at my parents' house...
"I am pleased to inform you of your placement as an Assistant Language Teacher for the 2006-2007 Japanese Exchange and Teaching program.
You have been assigned to Hokkaido, Otoineppu-mura."
My mother reads this to me over the phone. I blink. "Mom... do you know what 'mura' means? It means VILLAGE."
So I turned to the internet. What is this Otoineppu place? Well if you believe the boast of its own website, it is "Smallest village in Hokkaido~!" Ho-ly crap. They have a population of one thousand. A hot springs. A few noodle restaurants. A ski slope. And a truck stop. There is a bus route that takes it to neighboring, equally minute villages. There is a local train line that will take you to Sapporo in about three hours. Sapporo--it's like the El Paso of Japan, only on the map because they'd hate to leave that huge section blank. If I hopped trains for a day and a half, I could probably make it to Tokyo. Their accents are so far removed from standard Japanese that people from Tokyo can't understand them. Click here for the map.
Did they not listen to me? I'm expected to spend a year of my life there. I stared at my computer screen and cried.
And then I got up and went looking on the internet for a better job. Updates incoming on how that goes. I leave you with a list I compiled, arguments for and against accepting placement in Otoineppu:
Why I should:
-I applied to the JET program, it's tacky to back out now.
-I'm guaranteed a job for a year and a reliable salary.
- ** The JET people will assist me in finding accommodations and getting settled in **
Why I shouldn't:
-I never signed on for a village of 1000 in the ass end of Hokkaido. If they don't respect my requests, then I don't have to adhere to their decision.
-The goal of going to Japan is to learn the language; I'm a city slicker and antisocial under the best of circumstances. I don't see myself being motivated to spend the time necessary for language-learning with these people.
-Furthermore, their accents are whack--I heard about this in detail from Dr. Traphagan. It does me no good whatsoever if the language I learn isn't what I'm trying to read.
-I'm going to be miserable there. Going to a place knowing full well you're not going to like it is dumb, dumb, DUMB. It's like a recipe for mental breakdown.
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| Thursday, December 15th, 2005
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11:24 pm - Murakami Haruki, Translator's Prerogative, and Me
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| Monday, August 15th, 2005
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6:03 pm - A linguistics fetish
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The reason I'm a translator is not because I can't find any other work. (Although I am a translator of comic books because no one else will hire me.) This isn't an interim job until I get out of school, when I can go into something boring and respectable like computer science (long past that), something that I'll laugh about with my equally staid husband when we talk about the wacky things we did in college for money, but won't tell my kids about. Nope, translating will be my career because I, my friends, have a fetish for linguistics.
Not the boring stuff they teach you in linguistics 301, about morphemes and allomorphs and phonemes and allophones--even I couldn't keep those straight, and I sort-of cared. What fascinates me is how languages translate, and even more, how they don't. How something can be poetry in one language but sound horribly awkward in another, despite the translator's best efforts. What languages reflect about the culture they express--how in one language, a rather complex concept is such an integral part of their society that they have a single word for it, but in translation it would take paragraphs to explain. Or when the target language doesn't share that concept at all, and all the verbose explanation in the world can only describe the concept in terms of others. "It's like _____, only not quite..."
The notion of "kami" is one of my favorites, "shinigami" in particular. Raised in a culture without the concept of kami even I can't truly understand it, but I understand enough to appreciate the problem of translating it. Kami is usually translated as "god" with a lowercase g, but even with the lack of capitalization it doesn't match our Western ideas of what gods are. Gods, even ones with a lowercase g, are unique. Greek gods, for example--Zeus and Hera and Athena and Ares and all the rest--now those are gods. The notion of kami, however, would include nearly anything from Greek mythology that is inhuman and vaguely powerful--satyrs, nymphs, dryads, zephyrs, you name it. The official answer for the question "How many kami are there?" is "Eight million." It's tied up with Shintoism, though, so most Westerners don't have to deal with it, even anime nuts.
Unless the kami in question is a shinigami, which is the character for death plus the character for kami, and somehow seems to crop up quite a bit. The various ways that shinigami can be translated are apparently infinite. The ones that come to mind are "god of death" (predictable), "angel of death" (slightly more appropriate), and "soul reaper" (wtf?). Because kami aren't all-powerful, you see, some of them aren't very powerful at all. A shinigami is not a god of death, because that would imply that they are Death with a capital D, the one that comes for you when it is your time, etc etc. I have a hard time with this concept, because nobody explains it and yet it seems that all Japanese people intuitively understand what is meant by shinigami. The best I can explain shinigami is only in terms of what they're not--they're not human, they're not all-powerful, and they're certainly not unique. Wherever shinigami turn up, they're never The God of Death. They're more like... bureaucrats. Undead underlings. They aren't evil and they don't bring death per se, although they could probably kill you if they wanted to. Usually they keep death and the afterlife tidy and keep it from tampering with people who aren't dead. So what on earth do you call them in English? Easy, whatever you want to. The gaijin will have to figure it out as they go along anyway, since there's no word to sum it all up.
Whew, that was a lot of talking. An example of the verbose explanation that still can't quite pin down the meaning, only make comparisons. The other thing that tickles my fancy is the technical aspects of the Japanese language itself, and how much fun they have with kanji. Kanji are pictographs hijacked from Chinese that are associated with a one particular concept and at least two pronunciations--the original Chinese one and a Japanese pronunciation grafted on later. Occasionally you will get a kanji compound (a word formed from two or more characters) in which the same characters combined in the same way can be read differently and have different meanings. In other words, on paper it looks identical but it has two pronunciations and those have completely different meanings. Like "kedoru" (to suspect; to sense) and "kidoru" (to affect; to put on airs), for example.
*Sigh* I adore Japanese.
And I like to take these concepts of particular interest and work them into the fiction I write. It makes the world-building more real, somehow. And, since I also like to inflict my writing on others, here's the linguistic depth behind the word I used as a title for one book--
Lokhailen.
That was the Sedekevran word for this place, when scholars found themselves unable to pronounce its name in the Watertree tongue so they simply translated the meaning—sanctuary. It was more subtle in the original language however, and he found himself scratching out the Watertree pictographs on the shale beside him. Two characters, one that meant untouchable or unreachable, and the other that simply meant place. Read one way it meant sanctuary; the same two characters had a second reading however, that was usually translated as “heaven,” but didn’t mean that at all. It was the Watertree word for places that existed, but not for humans—a concept that didn’t even exist in Sedekevra, much less merit a word of its own. Mystical, supernatural places that no human could reach. Not quite heaven, and not quite sanctuary.
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| Friday, August 12th, 2005
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7:15 pm - An odd, under-handed sort of ego boost...
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...is to see porn that you translated for sale on Amazon. The one review is positive, and specifically compliments the translation job, which would be flattering except that they liked the book which isn't much of a recommendation for good taste. But in all seriousness, boss-lady & co really pulled through--they did an amazing job with everything, from cover design to the weight of the paper that my boss-lady was obsessing over when she was in town. The translation quality is just the most noticeable feature of a job done well or poorly.
In other news, we are proceeding nicely through the piles of books we acquired. Book reviews will be incoming as we finish. (I'm currently reading three at once. o.O)
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enkelien's journal