June 21, 2010

SWET Newsletter, No. 124

Roundtable

Translating Shiba Ryōtarō‘s Saka no Ue no Kumo, with Juliet Winters Carpenter, Andrew Cobbing, Paul McCarthy, Saitō Sumio, Takechi Manabu, and Noda Makito

In 2009, translation got underway of best-selling novelist Shiba Ryōtarō‘s eight-volume Saka no ue no kumo (working title, “Clouds Above the Hill”), a planned three-year project funded through Japan Documents, an independent publisher under the direction of Saitō Sumio. The translators are Juliet Winters Carpenter (professor, Doshisha Women’s College of Liberal Arts, Kyoto), Andrew Cobbing (professor, University of Nottingham, U.K.), and Paul McCarthy (professor, Surugadai University, Tokyo). Two Japanese translators experienced with J-E translation, Takechi Manabu and Noda Makito, are also helping with the project as translation checkers. SWET asked the translators, publisher Saitō, the two checkers, and Phyllis Birnbaum, editor of the translation, to discuss their perspectives on and experiences with the project so far. As of April 2010, translation of three volumes of Shiba’s novel have been completed.

SWET Events

Walking through History and Writing about Culture, by Enbutsu Sumiko

On a hot July day in 2009, SWET’s Summer Party featured a kaiseki lunch at the Kantokutei restaurant in Tokyo’s Koishikawa Kōrakuen garden and a talk by Sumiko Enbutsu. Enbutsu, author of Discover Shitamachi: A Walking Guide to the Other Tokyo (1984), Water Walks in the Suburbs of Tokyo (2000), A Flower Lover’s Guide to Tokyo (Kodansha International, 2007), and other walking guides to Tokyo and surrounding areas, spoke about how her books came about and some of the activities and research projects in which she has been involved. This article is a condensed and edited transcript of her talk.

SWET Member News

Saji Yasuo: I-House Press and English-Language Nonfiction Publishing in Japan, by Imoto Chikako

Saji Yasuo, publications officer of I-House Press, has been a member of SWET since its early days and is the proud owner of a full set of the SWET Newsletter. His career parallels that of many veteran SWET members, and he has been witness to the great changes that have taken place in publishing culture, technology, and English wordsmithing in Japan over four decades. Imoto Chikako’s article is based on an interview in Japanese with Saji at International House of Japan in October 2009.

SWET Cyber Matters

Red Card for Wordsmiths? SWET-L to the Rescue, by Torkil Christensen

Summary of threads on the mailing list SWET-L for the autumn and winter of 2009-2010. Wherein English stares at its second million words, Strunk & White mark their fiftieth, and the list remains attentively helpful but chides misspelling denizens of its cyber world.

Book Reviews

Selling Improved English, and the Dilemmas of Prescriptivism

Reviewed by John McCreery and Jens Wilkinson
Do You Make These Mistakes in English?: The Story of Sherwin Cody’s Famous Language School. By Edwin L. Battistella. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Hardcover, ISBN 978-0-19-536712-6.

A Semantic Adventure

Reviewed by Ginny Tapley Takemori
At Home in Japan: A Foreign Woman’s Journey of Discovery. By Rebecca Otowa. Tokyo: Tuttle Publishing, 2010. Hardcover, ISBN 978-4-8053-1078-6.