Write-up of January 11 meeting, Larry Brouhard presentation:

Lessons from a long career in technical documentation: Omit unnecessary words. Follow William K. Zinsser’s advice in [em]On Writing Well,[/em] “There is no sentence too short in the eyes of God.”

Write-up of February 22 meeting, Jack Halpern presentation:

Launching “SWET on Saturdays,” Jack Halpern told how one student of Japanese wound up creating a Japanese-English character dictionary and massive Chinese, Japanese, and Korean lexical databases now used to aid Internet search engines.

[em]Art of Translation—Translation of Art[/em] [in which an excerpt from an article about the contemporary artist Yokoo Tadanori is translated]

“Over Their Shoulders” offers SWET members a chance to see different people performing the same task—a task that becomes different because different people bring different sensitivities and different abilities to it.

One of the greatest mysteries confronting the foreign expert in Japan is the assumption on the part of many Japanese, whose talents presumably lie elsewhere, that they can improve on the expert’s work. Kindly Aunt Eva is tolerant to a fault, but this kind of interference has the old tabby’s tail twitching irritably. What is the thinking behind such behavior?

“Rough Words” in its first series was said to “comment wryly on the garbled English generated by native speakers of Japanese or by native speakers of English working in Japan who through overexposure to ‘Janglish’ have become desensitized to the nuances of their own language.” This new series faces the regrettable fact that many abuses of common words now are inflicted by native speakers of English working in English-speaking nations.

Although many SWET operating decisions are discussed and made entirely online, the Steering Committee does meet from time to review policy and to firm up implementation. Read the February 9, 2003, meeting report here. And if you would like to join the Steering Committee, drop us a line.

Almost everyone likes spaghetti, except when it refers to a tangled mass of cables holding a home office network together. Hugh Ashton takes a look at today’s wireless technology and offers some timely advice to help us benefit from it.

What does it mean to understand an ad? And what specifically does it mean to understand a Japanese ad? The ads we examine are more than an opportunity to learn about Japanese advertising; they are also an opportunity to learn something about the society in which those ads were produced.