May 6, 2026

Translating from Japanese to English: Jumping Into the Pond

Juliet Winters Carpenter

Juliet W. Carpenter, translator and professor of literature at Doshisha Women’s University spoke to SWET Kansai members and others on May 20, 2007 in Osaka and headed a workshop-type discussion of points relating to translation of a passage handed out in advance to those attending. The following article is based on a transcript of the main lecture reflecting on five of Carpenter’s translation published over the year 2006.

I have been interested in translation since about the age of sixteen or seventeen. In high school we had a textbook with a sentence that read Poka poka to atataku naru to, ume no hana ga sakimasu (ぽかぽかと暖かくなると、梅の花が咲きます). I fell in love! How could you possibly express poka poka in English? Just to say atataku naru to is not the same as saying poka poka to atataku naru to. It’s so different. It was realizing the fun of things like that that got me hooked. 

Then I read a translation by Edward Seidensticker. What impressed me was not so much the book as him. He awakened me to the existence of the translator. He loomed so much larger than the author in my mind. My eyes were opened—I saw that it’s the translator who enables us to read and appreciate books in other languages. Some authors, I discovered, had multiple translators. I would read one novel by Natsume Sôseki, for example, and not be much impressed, but then I would read another and think he was really good. It became clear to me from the little Japanese I knew that translation would be very challenging. I could see that some people did it better than others—and Seidensticker did it really well. 

I did wonder whether I would ever know enough Japanese. What you have to know is limitless. Now my students ask me, how do you learn a language? All I can say is that you just don’t stop learning. If you ever stop and say, well I can’t do this, then you’re not learning it. It takes persistence, and I would say the same thing for being a translator. How do you be a translator? You remain interested in it, you pursue it. 

Translating the Spirit
So far I have translated some fifty books, and one TV show. Last year was quite amazing, being the first year that I had five of my translations published all in the same year. The first was a bilingual book called Welcome to Mozart/Môtsuaruto e yôkoso (モーツアルトへようこそ) published by Shogakukan. It is a child’s introduction to Mozart that includes a CD. You learn a little bit about Mozart’s life, and there are pictures of Mozart doing cute things like skateboarding as well as playing the piano, to get kids interested in his music. It is also about Mozart’s moods. The idea is that a painter expresses his moods by painting, a poet by writing poetry, and Mozart wrote to his father when he was twenty that “I am a musician. I express myself through music.” There are ten pictures of Mozart in different moods, each with its own heading and brief explanation. The first one is waku waku (わくわく), the second doki doki (どきどき), and so on, all the way through to uttori (うっとり). The child has to answer the question, “What mood are you in right now?” And if you are doki doki, then you push number 2 on the CD and listen to what Mozart wrote when he was doki doki. 

I immediately had a problem with the difference between waku waku and doki doki. My first tendency for waku waku would be to say excited, but that would also be my first tendency for doki doki. In this case they have to be different, so you need to look at how the author of the book has conceived of them. For waku waku, the curtain is about to come up and Mozart is shown holding an egg with a bird trying to get out of the egg. Something is going to happen, something is being born. Waku waku “. . . excited.” After thinking it over I went back to my original. 

The problem was then doki doki. It has to be different. It is different. In this one, Mozart is chasing a cute little red heart that has wings and is flying away, just out of his grasp. The piece of music is an aria about falling in love, containing the lines “Oh tell me, you who know about love, is this what love is like? First I feel hot, then I’m cold.” This kind of doki doki reflects the excitement of “I wonder, is he the one? Am I really in love?” I decided to translate it as “pitter patter,” because it’s a sort of fluttery feeling. Even if children won’t know that word, the explanation in the short accompanying text makes the connection clear: “Your heart goes pitter patter when you see somebody you like.” And of course, Japanese readers can figure out the meaning from the Japanese text. 

For run run (るんるん) I did something similar, using “lighthearted.” It has to match the picture, which here shows Mozart playing the piano. We see him feeling happier and happier until he finally starts to float up and away. “Lighthearted” seemed to fit well because he gets lighter and lighter until he’s gone. 

I had trouble with mori mori (もりもり). This was for a love song from “The Magic Flute.” Papageno and Papagena fall in love and sing a duet that goes “Papapa papapa Papageno, papapa papapa Papapagena.” It’s all full of “Papapa.” The Japanese author heard this and associated it with the expression pa pa pa to katazukeru (ぱぱぱっと片付ける) —tidy up briskly, which is used with shigoto (仕事 work). So, shigoto—mori mori. When your work piles up, you clear it away. For my translation I put “rarin’ to go.” At least in English it applies to other things besides work—it conveys a certain passion. The word in the original text is simply based on the sound pa pa pa, which does not have the same association in English at all. I think this is a case where you could play around with it a little more and come up with something completely different, although you would need to be really creative. 

A common problem is how to translate humor, and recently I had to address this with my students as we have been translating Jerry Lewis’s movie Geisha Boy into Japanese. A joke has to be funny; it has to work. If it doesn’t work, don’t do it. In this movie Jerry Lewis’s character can’t pronounce Japanese, so he keeps calling one boy “What a nibble” instead of “Watanabe” It’s mildly amusing in English, but you can’t really do anything with it in Japanese. However, there’s another character named Ichiyama, so I thought maybe in the subtitles he could call him Imaichi イマイチ, which means “not quite there.” It’s not a direct translation, but it does capture, for people who can’t understand the English, the mood of what Jerry Lewis is doing with language. I think doing things like that is okay. You translate the spirit of the wordplay, however you can. 

So, what to do with pa pa pa? In the explanation I put, “Faster than you can say pa pa pa, your work will be over.” This unfortunately strikes me as rather lame. Another possibility could have been to play more on the sound. Instead of using pa pa pa you could have pop pop pop—the spelling doesn’t matter since it sounds the same in English. Something like “You feel like popping popcorn after you listen to this,” or, “Faster than popcorn pops.” Well, maybe not those, but in any case, that’s how you do it. You play with the sound and ideas until something clicks. You try it, and sort of live with it a while, and then either accept it or reject it. Anyway, “Rarin’ to go” wasn’t too bad, and the publisher was quite happy with it. And since this is, after all, a bilingual book, I felt I had to follow the Japanese pretty closely. 

For this book I didn’t need any technical help. However, my brother composes operas and is very knowledgeable about music, so I did run it by him. It is always a good idea, if you have time to show your translation to a willing reader. It’s the age of the Internet, so this can be done quite quickly. Get as much feedback as you can. My brother knew all the music, but he didn’t agree with all of the moods—the problem was he wanted to rewrite the whole book. You can’t do that. Even if you get a different feeling for the music yourself, you’re stuck with the feelings that the author had or that Mozart had. That’s the nature of translation. 

In an earlier talk I gave at SWET, I said that translation to me is very like coloring in a color book. You’re stuck with this picture that somebody else drew, and you can give life to it in your own way. That’s what you’re doing in translation—you’re giving life to a work for people to whom it doesn’t mean anything because it’s in a foreign language. You infuse it with life—and you can do it any way you want, which is why, like coloring, it is so much fun! You’re in control. She can wear a pink dress or a blue dress. It doesn’t matter. But it has to follow rules of jōshiki—it has to follow the outlines provided. The sky is usually going to be blue, although you can make a purple sky for a sunset, if you like. As long as you have a reason for what you’re doing, you can change it. However, you cannot change the picture. You cannot take out somebody who is there. Well, maybe you could put a little tree over here if you thought it needed one. 

You have to strike a balance between being creative and not changing the feel or intention of the text. Either you like this balancing act, or you don’t. I do think there’s a lot of creativity in translation. People do not seem to appreciate how much you really have to be a child in some ways. You have to have a sort of childlike enjoyment of words and language. 

Another comparison might be that great haiku by Bashō: furuike ya (the text) kawazu (the translator) tobikomu mizu no oto. You jump in, you become immersed in it, and out of that experience comes something. You have to really submerge yourself in it and surround yourself, so that you and the pond together make a splash. Hopefully somebody somewhere hears it. But even if nobody hears it, you’re having a great time, jumping into the pond. It really is a bonus for me that people read books that I have translated since I would probably translate them anyway. But still you do have to identify with the reader just as much as you identify with the author. That’s another way that you have to balance all the way through: you have to be the child who’s reading the book, the parent who’s reading it to the child, and also the author. And in this case, Mozart.

Recasting in Poetry Translation
The second book I did was Overkill. The original was the poetry anthology Ōbākiruオーバーキル that won the tenth Nakahara Chūya Prize, a prize awarded to gendaishi (works of modern poetry—not tanka, not haiku, but specifically modern poetry) and usually first-time poets. Until 2007, part of first prize was that the anthology would be translated into English for worldwide distribution. The books are published by Yamaguchi City.

One year Arthur Binard won this prize, which is pretty amazing—he’s an American writing poetry in Japanese. He did his own translation, which was very interesting since we had the rare chance to see how a poet translates himself. He broke all the rules, and did things we could never get away with! There was one poem called “Tag.” He’s sitting in Ikebukuro wearing a T-shirt his mother in Michigan sent him when he was in Italy, while the tag says it was made in Indonesia. And he’s thinking about whether it really makes any difference where it was originally made, and also about his own identity. He has been to all these different places, but maybe it’s about time for him to rip off his tag and just be a person instead of worrying about where he came from. 

In the original poem, his mother comes up several times, but in the English version she is only mentioned once. I would never have been able to do that if I were translating it. His reason was that in English, mentioning his mother too often made it sound like he had a mother complex, whereas in Japanese it doesn’t convey that at all. And that’s true. Yet as a translator, you are not entitled to make that kind of decision—you only have the text, and you can’t take that kind of liberty with it. So you have to try to identify with the author, but you cannot ever do so completely. I think that’s okay. (For more about Arthur Binard, please see SWET Newsletter No. 103, pp. 5–9.)

Translating poetry is a whole different realm of translation from other types of text. Even if you can’t do the things that Binard did, you do have to recast it. In Basho’s haiku I just quoted you can keep the images in the same order in translation, but other times you can’t. And just changing the order the images occur in a poem makes it a completely different poem. That is one thing I pay attention to, both in poetry and in prose. In translation theory, you have gyaku okuri, where you take the modifier and put it in the middle of the sentence, and jun okuri, where you translate a sentence in the same order as the original. Japanese students are taught the gyaku okuri way at school, which means that their translations don’t flow. The jun okuri method is usually better. 

Take a sentence like, “The eyewitness reported that the plane crashed and burned.” You can change the grammatical form in order to keep the order of the sentence. For example, instead of ending with . . . to mokugekisha ga hōkoku shimashita, you can start with Mokugekisha no hanashi ni yoreba . . . so that you end with the accident, as in the original. But you do have to decide whether it is more effective to start with the crash or end with the crash. You always have that choice. In poetry that’s very important. However, between Japanese and English it will probably never come out the same as the original. You just have to do the best you can.

The poems in Overkill are very dark, but what saves them is that the author knows she’s being really dark and she kind of pokes fun at herself. The challenge is to capture both of these elements—the tone where she is suicidal, but she thinks it’s funny. You can almost see it in the title: she’s going to jump, but that would be overkill. I used footnotes for a couple of these poems, which I don’t usually do. I try to avoid footnotes for fiction or for poetry, just because if a text doesn’t have footnotes in the original, putting them in seems to make it more academic. There are times when they are unavoidable, however. 

The Translator Has to Understand 
The third book was The Hunter (Kogoeru kiba), which is a murder mystery by Asa Nonami, published by Kodansha International. I was asked a really amazing question at a talk I gave at the University of Hawai‘i in March: “When you translate a mystery, what happens if you get all the way to the end and find that the killer isn’t who you thought it was going to be? Do you have to go back and change all your translation?” I had to explain that could never happen; I would never translate a mystery without knowing first who did it. When you translate a book—any book—you have to understand it as well as you possibly can before you start translating. 

One of the things you have to have a feel for is how people talk. That was a big challenge in The Hunter, because you have the middle-aged cop and the young policewoman, and you have her arguing with her sister and mother, and there is a little girl, an old lady, a gay beauty shop owner, and more. Each of these people has a distinctive voice and they have to sound like themselves. Making dialogue sound authentic is hard. I think it is one of the hardest things about writing in general, and even harder as a translator. It can also be a lot of fun.

Incidentally, The Hunter was notable for being the first book I ever did with the f-word. This is something I usually avoid using, since I wonder whether it is really justified. It is not something I think you need to put it in just for effect. In this case it had to be there, there was no way around it. The original was yaru (やる) and one neutral possibility might be to use “do”—“they were doing it.” But here other policemen, all guys, are talking among themselves and someone says something like umaku yatteru kana (うまくやってるかな), full of double entendre, before realizing that Takako is listening. It had to be that word so that she says to herself, “Who do they think I am? I know that word.” The context demanded an offensive word so that she would think to herself how silly they were for imagining they had to protect her from hearing it. If that word was “do,” it wouldn’t be offensive. 

Here’s an interesting phrase which the older detective mutters to himself. He goes into a beautifully named telephone club (tere-kura) called Cherry Boom Boom and he sees forty pictures of high school girls on the wall. He has a daughter of the same age, and is horrified at the thought that her picture could be there. In the back room, there is a pink carpet and white tables where the girls sit and wait for somebody to come in or call them up. He mutters to himself, Ocha o hikazu ni jisho o hikutte wake ka (お茶をひかずに辞書を引くってわけか) Ocha o hiku is an expression from the world of geisha, which means waiting for a customer. So these girls are doing their English homework, looking up words in the dictionary, while they’re waiting for a customer. You have to put this into English—and it has to sound like a concerned father and like a policeman, there has to be some kind of wordplay, and it has to give a feeling for what kind of place you are in. He says this for a reason, and you have to get all of that across. 

If you like translation, this is the sort of thing you live for! When you think of hiku, what comes to mind is that you thumb through the dictionary, so you could do something with “thumb.” The girls are waiting, so you could have “twiddle your thumbs.” That might work, but it doesn’t convey the atmosphere of the place. Another expression using thumbs is “thumbs up.” That indicates approval, so it could be used to mean one of the girls getting chosen. I then went to the Internet and looked up the biggest brothel I could find, and it did actually say that the girls wait for a “thumbs up”—so it is authentic brothel language, perfect! I then translated it as, “While they wait for the thumbs up, they thumb through their dictionaries.” But still the point of the dictionaries is unclear, so I ended up leaving out the dictionaries and had them thumbing through their homework. After more tweaking, the final version became, “So basically this was the next thing to a brothel. Get a thumbs-up or thumb through your homework while you wait your turn.” There are obviously other possible solutions—one of my students did something using “pick up” You pick up a girl, or you pick up a dictionary. That’s the general idea, though—you play with language while trying to connect different ideas. That’s the fun, and that’s the challenge of it. 

I’ll mention one other noteworthy problem in The Hunter. The wolf dog rips out a man’s throat, and as the man is lying in the street, his life ebbing away, he feels as if his viscera are prickling in the cold air. It’s really gross, memorable. The problem is that viscera refers to the guts, not the throat! The original says naizō no yō na (内臓のような). In Japanese it doesn’t appear contradictory because of the yō na, but that doesn’t work in English. This is a tricky point between Japanese and English. In Japanese you get this yō na a lot, and if you are not careful, it can tend to lard up your English. One of the things I generally do at the end of a translation is search for words like “seemingly,” and check whether I do actually need them or not. It wasn’t seemingly hot, it was hot. Things that don’t sound wrong in Japanese may just not work in English, and you have to change them. There are quite a few differences like this that you need to be alert to. I had to tweak the “viscera” sentence to get rid of what would otherwise seem a huge blooper on the part of the author.

In Jasmine, a splendid book by Tsujihara Noboru that I just finished translating, we caught all kinds of little things, some of which did turn out to be mistakes. It’s a long book and you don’t necessarily notice these things as a casual reader, but as a translator you have to deal with them. For example somebody at the beginning is someone else’s great uncle, but later on he’s his great grandfather—so which is it? In this case I had to check it with the author, but that’s not always possible. There is a Japanese book called Tekusuto wa machigawanai: Shōsetsu to dokusha no shigoto テクストはまちがわない　小説と読者の仕事 (The Text Does Not Err: Novels and the Job of the Reader), by Ishihara Chiaki 石原千秋, 393 pp., Chikuma Shobō, 2004) that has some interesting ideas about how to read a text. It is important not to automatically assume something is a mistake. It is all too easy to get up on your high horse about what you perceive as an error, but you can be very embarrassed when you later realize that the text was right and you were the one who had not understood it. Your first assumption should not be that the text is wrong. You have to assume that you haven’t understood it, and check and double-check everything that is problematic. There are indeed sometimes errors, but it is not always clear-cut. Author Ishihara notes that even if the name of a character is written with two different sets of kanji, that might not necessarily be a mistake. Anyway, to be a good translator, you have to be a good reader. 

The Pursuit of the “Good Translation” 
This next book is about Shinran and the philosophy of the Jōdō Shinshū school of Buddhism, which he founded. This one took a little over four years, much the longest of any of these translations. Partly that’s because of the difficult content and partly it’s because of the need to work in tandem with the authors. Kentetsu Takamori, the main author, speaks no English and so everything had to be back-translated for his approval, sometimes in competing versions.

The original title is Naze ikiruなぜ生きる. If you render that as Why Live? it gives the exact opposite of the message the book is trying to convey. We eventually gave it the title, You Were Born for a Reason. It’s completely different and much longer, but hopefully it will grab people’s attention—you were born for a reason. It was tricky because we had to make it sound digestible, easy to understand, dignified, and not too Christian. Buddhist and Christian concepts may be very similar at times, but it can be misleading to borrow too much from one tradition in translating about another. 

I’ll give you one example of a problem we had that could come up in any book. The phrase Inochi wa chikyū yori omoi 命は地球より重い was repeated frequently throughout the book as a proverbial expression that everyone was assumed to know and agree with. It is used to convey the enormous value of human life. A literal translation would be “life is heavier than the earth,” only we don’t say that in English. We really needed a good translation for this because it appeared all the time. One possibility I came up with was “A human life is infinitely precious.” The authors, however, preferred to have something closer to the original expression. One of the people on the team found a poem by Erich Maria Rilke, called “The Neighbor” in English, which ends with the phrase “The heaviness of life is heavier than the heaviness of all things.” Bingo! We simply borrowed this phrase, giving credit to Rilke and then repeating, “In the words of Rilke…” where necessary (the translator gets full credit in a footnote, by the way). We still used the other phrase, “infinitely precious,” for variation, however.

Getting by With a Little Help From My Friends 
The final book was Waiting on the Weather: Making Movies with Akira Kurosawa, published by Stone Bridge Press. This is a delightful, chatty book of essays by Nogami Teruyo, Kurosawa’s long-time script-girl-turned production manager, full of insights into the director’s personality, work habits, and style. Again, the original title Tenki machi 天気待ち was an interesting challenge. This refers to the old days before the days of computer effects, when, if you wanted to have a cloud over here, you had to wait for the cloud to move the right way until you could film the scene. Tenki machi refers to that situation of sitting around shooting the breeze while you’re waiting for the breeze to blow the cloud your way. They originally called it Waiting for Weather but I changed it to Waiting on the Weather, which is a little bit more colloquial, a little bit more fun.

One interesting thing that happened in the course of translating this book is that we were able to persuade the author to write some additional chapters that weren’t in the original. She added some material on Kurosawa and Mifune, and on Kurosawa’s relationships with various foreign directors. Now this translation will be retranslated back into Japanese in a new edition to reflect such changes and additions. This sometimes happens with books that are extensively re-edited as part of the translation process. 

For this book I did need a lot of technical help, with movie titles as well as all kinds of technical details. Author Teruyo Nogami was extremely cooperative, and to check my English I had not only Donald Richie himself but the Canadian filmmaker Marty Gross, as well as two Japanese checkers who went through the translation meticulously. If you have never seen a particular device, or camera, how can you know what it looks like or how it works? Even seeing a picture of it may not be enough. There are different kinds of cameras, some no longer in use, and camera angles and kinds of film, all of it technical vocabulary. This is an area where creativity is not called for—either you know the correct term or you don’t. It is very important to acquire as much knowledge of a subject as you possibly can—and then to have good checkers, too. 

Actually I needed technical help on The Hunter as well. The young policewoman is a biker, which is something I don’t know much about. Even if you think that there is not much to know, if it doesn’t ring true to people who are in that world then the translation would not be successful. My former roommate’s brother happens to be into motorcycles, and he was really helpful about things I would never have known. It always pays to get advice. So often, even if you think you have it right, you don’t—it’s like when they try to reproduce Japanese culture in an American movie, they get it all wrong. My roommate’s brother gave me one phrase that I am really grateful for. Takako is soaking in the bath after being out on her bike all day, and she says Yoku hashitta! よく走った. He gave me two possibilities, “gnarly ride” and “sweet ride.” I thought “sweet ride” was perfect. People can give you things like that you wouldn’t think of on your own. The world is a big place and we know little parts of it, but we can never know the whole thing. 

*     *      *

I remember, on several occasions, listening intently to Ed Seidensticker talk at length about why he translated the first two sentences of Snow Country the way he did, and how he felt about the decisions he had made. Theoretically it would be possible to do similar commentary for virtually every sentence of a translated book, or line of a poem, although I doubt whether this would really be useful or even desirable. I realize that there is much more I could have said about each of these works described above, but so much of what I do is actually on an instinctual, gut level that sometimes it is hard to articulate just why something came out a certain way. I hope that the aspects I have covered here will be of help to other translators as they enjoy splashing around in the pond.

(© 2007 Juliet Winters Carpenter. As published in the SWET Newsletter, No 117 (October 2007, pp. 3–16)