Articles
April 17, 2011
How the Heck Do You Write about Japan?
by Alice Gordenker
Journalist Alice Gordenker spoke to SWET on September 16, 2010 in Tokyo, providing a behind-the-scenes account of how she crafts her popular “So, What the Heck Is That?” column for the Japan Times. In this monthly column, in its seventh year as of this writing, Gordenker has achieved a balance of humor and respect in meticulously researched yet... more
October 18, 2010
Rebecca Otowa on Writing at Home in Japan
by Avery Udagawa
What is it like to be a foreign-born wife, daughter-in-law, and mother in a 350-year-old Japanese farmhouse? To undergo years of traditional training before becoming the chatelaine?
And what is it like to write and illustrate a book about this experience? To have a review and one’s wedding photo published in the New York Times?
Rebecca Otowa titled... more
July 23, 2010
The Hadashi no Gen Project
by Alan Gleason
Alan Gleason’s experience as a translator began in 1977 with the manga Hadashi no Gen (Barefoot Gen), as part of a volunteer project that continued for 30 years. Project Gen inadvertently became the world’s first publisher of manga in translation when it issued Barefoot Gen Volume One in 1978. With the tenth and final English volume... more
January 28, 2010
About Mori Ōgai on Translation
by Kay Vreeland
The American Lauren Elkin writes a literary blog in Paris and she posted on Mori Ōgai on translation and fallacy. A snippet: “Ōgai talks about the virtues of being ‘wrong’ in translation—adding or detracting from the original text; of most interest, I think, is the final section in which he contemplates how far... more
December 2, 2009
SWET Open Forum 2009: Wordsmithing in Japan
by Katherine Heins
Where to go for translators’ resources, how to control your computer’s Japanese inputting settings, what an editor needs to know about word processing and other software, how to market your professional skills and carve your niche, how to get your work published, what to tell a Japanese author who wants his/her work published—these were some of the questions... more
November 23, 2009
Some Notes on Anthologies
by Suzanne Kamata
According to conventional wisdom, anthologies are a hard sell. Readers supposedly don’t buy them; reviewers are generally loath to review them; therefore, publishers tend to shy away from bringing them into print. Nevertheless, pick up any writing magazine and you’ll probably find a call for submissions to a forthcoming anthology. For example, in the January/February 2009 issue of... more