November 30, 2011

SWET Newsletter, No. 129

More details . . .

Japanese to English Translation
• Slave to the Word, by Michael Karpa

In an efficiency-first, high-tech world, will human translators soon be transformed into skilled slaves? We bring to the task of translation understanding and consciousness, exactly what both rule-based and statistically based MT translation lack, and the completeness of our understanding becomes the measure of what we do. Karpa recalls the history of reading text when there were no spaces between words (scriptura continua), a laborious task sometimes assigned to slaves. He cites studies illuminating how different parts of the brain are mobilized for reading ideographic characters and alphabetic characters. He discusses the processes involved in reading and understanding, mobilizing complex components and functions of the brain. By understanding how we understand, we can transcend the slave. Author of Translating in the Deep End (The ATA Chronicle, American Translators Association, Alexandria VA, Jan 2011), Michael Karpa is a long-time Japanese-to-English translator based in San Francisco, California.

March 11, 2011: Continuing Stories
• After March 11: A Magazine and Local Newspaper Respond to the Disaster, by Terri Nii

Terri Hogue (Nii) arrived in Kokura (Kyushu) from California in 1980 on a one-year teaching contract, where she saw notices of SWET meetings in the Japan Times (which arrived in “overseas” Kyushu one day late). After study, marriage, relocation, and incorporation, she joined the industry, and has been engaged in writing, editing, and translation activities for the past 15 years, based in Fujisawa. Currently editor of Eye-Ai magazine and a Shonan-based freelance writer, Nii recounts how two different publications that she is involved with decided to present information related to the March 11 disaster.

• The Silent Citadel: Poetry for 9/11 and 3/11, by Higashizono Tadatoshi

“Unbelievable” was the apt and ubiquitous word following the disaster now called “3/11.” Two unexpected and heartening things happened, one was the waves of compassion that rolled from around the world; the other was the outpouring of poetry in the 31-syllable (5-7-5-7-7) waka (tanka) and 17-syllable (5-7-5) haiku forms, which continues, even now. Translator Higashizono Tadatoshi draws our attention to the way human sentiment takes flight at times of crisis. 

SWET Events
• Orchards: Holly Thompson on Japan in Fiction for Teens, by Ann Slater

Holly Thompson’s first novel, Ash, was set in the shadows of Mt. Sakurajima in Kagoshima, and her most recent work, Orchards, is a young adult novel that traces the experiences of a half-Japanese girl in a coastal mikan-growing community in Shizuoka. How does Thompson write convincingly and sensitively about life in a culture not her own? And how—in the case of Orchards—does she interweave cross-cultural issues with difficult teen themes such as suicide and bullying? Through untiring research, collaboration, and revision, is the answer she gave at her June 10, 2011 talk for SWET at the Wesley Center in Minami Aoyama.

• Joan Ericson on Japanese Children’s Literature, by Lynne E. Riggs

The earliest literature identified as having been expressly written for Japanese children dates from the 1870s and 1880s. One thread was played out in the textbooks, reading material, and songs used in the modern schools established after 1872. Another emerged from the ideals and the pens of Japan’s modern writers—inspired by the romanticism and naturalism of the worlds of literature and art in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth century—who went on to write the stories now considered “truly modern" Japanese children’s literature. In her July 9, 2011 talk in Kyoto, Joan Ericson, professor of Japanese literature at Colorado College, wove a tale of the “discovery of the child,” the idea of the “pure and innocent” child, and the role of women in the shift to a more realistic conception of the child. Joan Ericson is translator of Hayashi Fumiko’s Hōrōki (as Diary of a Vagabond), and the author of Be a Woman: Hayashi Fumiko and Modern Japanese Women’s Literature (1997).

From the Steerage
• SWET Business Update: Looking Ahead

The SWET Newsletter in its present form will be published through No. 130 (March 2012). The SWET Web Design Committee is in the process of having the SWET website redesigned with a view to opening the new site in early 2012. SWET thanks Naomi Otani (general secretary), Bob Poulson (treasurer), and Neil Ramsay (membership secretary), for the long years of faithful service to SWET and welcomes their successors to these positions: Lynne Riggs, Chikako Imoto, and Kevin Cleary, respectively. This column includes a list of SWET Events in 2011.

Book Review
• Tidbits among the Triumphalism, by Charles De Wolf

Globish: How the English Language Became the World’s Language, by Robert McCrum. (New York: Penguin Books, 2010). ISBN 978-0-141-02719-4. Price ¥1,944.