Swet Columns

Steering Committee Meeting, May 1, 2022

Eleven members of the SWET Steering Committee met online to discuss pending issues and consider plans for 2022. The main topic was the proposal led by Winnie Bird for a SWET mentorship project, organized to facilitate know-how sharing among members and help us enhance our skills. SC supports this initiative and three members agreed to join Winnie as... more

EVENT REPORT: SWET Zoom Workshops Experiment 2020

By Richard Medhurst

Talking to other translators and wordsmiths at events and workshops inspires new discoveries and ways of thinking about what we do, as well as providing the chance to get to know people in the business. We used to do this in person until the pandemic made real-world meetings impossible, and led us to reconsider online spaces. One benefit of... more

EVENT REPORT: Brainstorming for SWET’s 40th Anniversary

On the evening of Wednesday, June 19, six SWET members gathered in Jinbōchō, Tokyo, for a brainstorming session about plans for celebrating SWET’s upcoming 40th anniversary. To start off with, we discussed the proposed date: SWET’s inaugural meeting was held on November 15, 1980, and in 2020, the 15th falls on Sunday. We agreed that mid-November 2020 sounded optimal,... more

EVENT REPORT: Press Trips and Language Tips for Travel Media

By Rob Goss

On March 20, 2019, twelve people, including five first-timers, attended the latest SWET Travel Writing Meetup in Tokyo at Book House Cafe, Jinbocho, for a presentation by photographer Phil Ono about the handling of style issues in place-name signage used around the country and a presentation by travel writer Rob Goss about press trips for travel writers and... more

SWET Kansai Event Report: Juliet Winters Carpenter—Reflections on the Translation of Ryōma!

By Susan E. Jones

In October, 17 SWET members and interested others eagerly gathered at Doshisha Women’s College of Liberal Arts in Kyoto to hear illustrious translator Juliet Winters Carpenter talk about her latest work, a joint translation project with two other translators of Ryōma! The Life of Sakamoto Ryōma:  Japanese Swordsman and Visionary by historical novelist Shiba Ryōtarō. The Japanese... more

EVENT REPORT – SWET Travel Writing Meet-up

By Rob Goss

The new travel writing group within SWET is up and running. Seventeen people came together on July 19 for the first meeting on a hot and humid night in Tokyo, some traveling from as far as Niigata and Kobe to the Book House Cafe, Jinbocho, Tokyo. We had a mix of writers, photographers, translators, interpreter-guides, and two tourism ambassadors... more