Swet Columns
January 16, 2012
The Wordsmith’s Craft
by Lynne E. Riggs
Some may have seen the New Year’s TV program showing the tsuikidoki craftsman who takes a flat sheet of copper and over three days to a week beats it into a gracefully shaped teapot, complete with spout, using only a hammer, a high-piled rack of toriguchi forming tools, and the accumulated experience of two or three decades... more
January 5, 2012
From the Steerage • The Future of the SWET Newsletter
by Lynne E. Riggs
The SWET Newsletter is going to change. As announced in No. 128, the present Newsletter will continue through No. 130, to come probably in February or March. After that, the new incarnation of the Newsletter will appear sometime in 2012, as part of our redesigned website (details on which see below).
Preparations for these changes... more
December 15, 2011
Slave to the Word
by Michael Karpa
In an efficiency-first, high-tech world, will human translators soon be transformed into skilled slaves? We bring to the task of translation understanding and consciousness, exactly what both rule-based and statistically based MT translation lack, and the completeness of our understanding becomes the measure of what we do. Karpa recalls the history of reading text when there were no... more
December 15, 2011
Tidbits among the Triumphalism
Globish: How the English Language Became the World’s Language, by Robert McCrum. (New York: Penguin Books, 2010). ISBN 978-0-141-02710-4.
Reviewed by Charles De Wolf
Globish: How the English Language Became the World’s LanguageBack in the early 1980s, when the weekly magazines here in Japan were publishing stories on the often acrimonious debate concerning the origins of the Japanese language,... more
November 30, 2011
SWET Newsletter, No. 129
Japanese to English Translation Slave to the Word, Michael Karpa March 11, 2011: Continuing Stories After March 11: A Magazine and Local Newspaper Respond to the Disaster, Terri Nii The Silent Citadel: Poetry for 9/11 and 3/11, Higashizono Tadatoshi SWET Events Orchards: Holly Thompson on Japan in Fiction for Teens, Ann Tashi Slater Joan Ericson on Japanese Children’s Literature, Lynne E. Riggs From the Steerage SWET... more
July 5, 2011