So you're ready to break into the translation business.

Are you really ready? Well, it doesn't matter so much. You think you're ready, and that means you're going to want to make contact with editors from the companies you will want to work with.

In other parts of the dojo, I've mentioned that you will want go to conventions and try to engage editors from different companies in a short conversation to leave a decent impression of yourself. One of the better ways to get a pleasant conversation is to ask the editor something that the editor can answer. "What do you look for in a good translator," might be a good example. In any case, you leave your card with the editor (nothing more than the card -- samples just create more clutter that the editor will have to lug home), and mail your sample after you get home from the convention.

But just in case the editor's answer wasn't complete, here's what the editor most wants from you:

Minimal level of competence.
Don't make obvious mistakes. Don't mistake one character for another. Make sure you include all translations and sound effects (it's easy to miss small sound effects and asides). Make sure your translation follows the storyline -- which means that if the translation for a balloon seems like it came out of left field, you probably mistranslated it. Make sure your page format is easy to read (learn how to use tabs and script formats effectively).

On-time performance.
Get your work in on or before the deadline, and you will get more work. I'm not kidding. Above the minimal level of competence, the people who get the most work are the people who cause the least amount of trouble. And the most trouble for an editor is a freelancer missing deadlines.

Be reachable.
The greatest worry for an editor is that a freelancer will take the assignment and the materials, flake out, and fall off the edge of the earth. Nothing drives and editor battier than it being a week past the deadline, and the freelancer is not answering the phone. Sure, it seems to the freelancer that phone calls from an editor for an overdue assignment is something akin to a loan-shark banging on your door for the money that you don't have, but it isn't the same. Really! If you underestimated how long it would take you to translate a manga, then you will have to gather up your courage and write that e-mail telling them so. Will the editor be mad? Hell, yes! But the editor won't be wondering whether you've decided to move to a South Pacific island to get away from the pressure. Hiding from the editor is childish, and children don't make very reliable professional freelancers.

Do the things you can do to improve your script.
You'd be amazed at how many scripts come in to an editor without ever having had a spell check run on them. There are a lot of freelancers who have never read Chicago's Manual of Style or Strunk & White. Having these things on hand will make your script so much easier to edit, and if you have an easily editable script, then you will have a friend as an editor.

Where possible, help the editor out.
Quite often, an editor will have an emergency translation or article that they need done in a hurry. If they are calling you, then it means that the editor is willing to rely on you in a pinch. This is a good thing. You don't have to do these emergency jobs for free, but unless your entire schedule will fall apart, take the job.

I'm sure I'm forgetting other tips that would help you get in good with your editor, but the main point is this: You are in a service industry and your client is the editor. If you impress your editor with your abilities and professionalism, it's more likely that the editor will request that you do his/her next assignment. When the editor does that, probably four times out of five, you will be assigned. You don't need to schmooze, but if you are easy to work with, everyone will want to work with you.

Posted by dojosensei at 09:25 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Most mangaka use humor to certain degrees. These come in many different forms from the extremely translator friendly forms to the one style of joke that every translator dreads, the pun.

Visual humor is the most translator-friendly form there is. If a character goes all chibi (tiny body and big head), grows cat-style ears, and does something cute, then there is no translation necessary. The visuals take care of it. Slapstick comedy is also visual and needs no translator help.

Hyper-dramatic humor only needs the translator to fit dialog to the images. If a normally mild-mannered character suddenly gets flame in his eyes, clenches his fist, and makes a profoundly over-the-top declaration, it's your duty as translator to make sure the English is as over-the-top as it is in Japanese. That's when you dust off words like "shall," or "must," and if you can fit it in, phrases like "rue the day."

Surprise-style humor is the type one sees quite a lot in School Rumble where a situation is built only to be turned on its ear when you turn the page. In these, the author is trying to set up an expectation which you as the translator must try to foster. For example in School Rumble Volume 2 on page 131, the author is trying to set up the expectation that the main character Tenma will recognize the male main character Harima. (Of course on the first panel of page 132, she mistakes him for something completely different.) The trick for the translator is to play the previous page straight, as if she did recognize Harima, without betraying the joke. Usually a translation with a light touch will accomplish this. Then go as over-the-top as necessary when the pay-off happens.

And then there's puns.

There have been puns in my translation career for which I've found and equivalent English word that has both meanings that the Japanese had. Every time I pat myself on the back so hard the red welts didn't heal for months. I was very proud of them. But most of the time a translator has only two options: joke substitution or choosing the meaning that moves the story along and abandoning humor. The decision is made a little tougher since most vocal hard-core fans want the second option in all cases.

When one meaning of the pun is a part of the thing that moves the story along, then going with the meaning that works for the plot is an option, but if the manga is written so that a joke is necessary in the spot and no similar word exists in English, then substituting a joke may be all that the translator can do.

As an example, also from School Rumble Volume 2 (page 43 for those keeping score), there is a point where Harima, egged on by his cousin, tries to confess his love for Tenma. The Japanese original uses the word kimi which means "you," but Tenma mistakes the word for a different kimi which means "yellow." The whole short scene is based on a pun, and if there is no equivalent pun, the scene will fall apart. I substituted a pun which played on the idea that saying "attractive you" would sound like "attractive view," and crossed my fingers that nobody would complain. (I think I got away with it mostly because I can use the translator's notes section in the back of Del Rey books to explain it.)

Most jokes are as fun for the translator as they are for the reader. But puns are a translator's bane. Still, getting a pun right is usually a translator's greatest victory.

Posted by dojosensei at 09:38 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

When you're about to translate dialog, there are many things that can prepare you for it. You can do some acting, improv, write your own stories, listen closely to others for differences in accent or word choice, read a lot, and probably many, many others.

Nothing prepares you to translate sound effects (SFX). Really. Nobody starts out prepared for this part of the task, not even long-time comic-book people (when you start from the blank slate of your own story, then any sound effect you come up with is correct, but in translation, you can get it wrong). The only thing you can do is get creative and dive in.

But that doesn't mean you can't develop a vocabulary of your own for sound effects. It can come from yourself or you can steal from others. I do a lot of both. But when it comes to those fight scenes and the effects are almost as big as the action, that's when it's time to break out the multiple consonants and come up with the original stuff.

The nice thing about English as opposed to Japanese is that we can use multiple consonants without having to stick vowels in the middle. That makes our roman letters somewhat more expressive than the Japanese characters. Use that. Write out a sound effect that sounds to you what the action would actually sound like. I can't tell you what to write since that's between you and your brain, but my advice on these SFX is don't be shy.

Below are some sound effects that I use. These are all personal choices, and if you don't think they sound like what they're representing, come up with (or steal) a sound that you do like.

ZUKIN = ZHAAN
Zukin is the sound for pain. To me, pain sounds like Zhaan. I don't know why, it just does. So I use it in my translations.

DOKI DOKI = B-BMP B-BMP
Doki-doki is the sound of a heart beat. This is used all over any manga with a romantic element. I used to be married to ba-dump as a standard SFX for this sound (see early Video Girl Ai manga), but I stole b-bmp from Gerard Jones after a while of seeing how it worked in manga I edited. It takes up less space (which is nice for the letterers) and conveys the sound as well or better.

NIKO NIKO, NIKKORI, HE-N = GRIN GRIN, SMILE, or HEHN
Niko-niko and the others are the sounds for smiles. In comedic moments the English Grin-grin or Smile can work in manga although I generally try not to use real English words for sound effects (I have plenty of exceptions). Hehn was another steal from Gerard Jones' SFX vocabulary since it works so well with a villainous smile.

ZAWA ZAWA = CHATTER CHATTER
For years I made up dialog to go into the background to represent the chatter going on, then it struck me that the word chatter sounded very much like an onomatopoeia in itself. I always felt a little odd about adding actual phrasing with meaning for background chatter since it wasn't in the Japanese, so when I hit upon the idea of chatter-chatter, it not only saved time, it came out even closer to the Japanese. When the chatter is subdued I use murmur-murmur. But I still have a problem with anybody but grade-school-age kids saying Wai-wai. I still haven't figured out the best translation for that situation.

SHIIIIIIIIN = HUSSSSSSH
This is the famous sound of silence that is found in manga. I, again, stole this translation from Gerard Jones since it works very well, especially when it is an uncomfortable silence.

PEKO PEKO = NOD NOD
Peko-peko is the sound of bowing, and in this situation as well, I found that using the English word works very well for the situation. I will sometimes use bow-bow, but I'm hesitant to use it since the old-time sound for a dog was bow-wow.

DO DO DO, GO GO GO = DM DM DM, GM GM GM
This was a quick substitution for very loud sounds such as a roaring river, racing engine, earthquake, and many others. Like Zhaan, I don't know if you would think that these sound like the original sound, but they do to me.

DOON = DOOM
Doon or Don is the sound of a dramatic entrance. With the English sound effect, not only do we get the use of image of the dramatic entrance to help out the effect, but the English sound effect is very close to the Japanese, and doom is also a synonym for fate!

In the next installment, I'll include more tips for usage and more of my standard effects.

Posted by dojosensei at 09:45 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The Words, Words, Words Translation From Hell takes time. The Research Quagmire TFH takes effort to go out and find what the whole thing is about, but there is only one thing that can help you with a Mad World TFH, a Japanese friend who has at least a touch of science-fiction otaku in him/her.

Blade Runner is a Mad World. Adam Warren's (and before that, Adam Warren and Toren Smith's) Dirty Pair comics were Mad World stories (good ones too). The Mad World comes from taking our world and expanding on the trends nowadays to make them absurd in order to point out how absurd the trends are today. But the problem becomes: to exaggerate them, the author throws in technology and concepts that, while they may have a basis in the real world, are way over-the-top science fiction ideas.

Masters of Mad World manga and anime that I've worked on are people like Masamune Shirow, Mamoru Oshii, and most recently, Hajime Ueda. (My exposure to Masamune Shirow was in a test translation I had to take for Toren Smith early in my career. The other two, I worked on for pay -- the Patlabor movies for Manga Entertainment and the recently released Q-ko-chan for Del Rey.)

Such a translation usually includes details from the real world that you would never think to look up otherwise. Patlabor had technology for draining Tokyo Bay that had to be deciphered (in Patlabor I's case, I didn't even have a script to work with). In Q-ko-chan, there were odd references to fascist government practices. These normally fall into the Research Quagmire TFH zone, but since they are combined with science fiction words, they also work as part of what takes up all of your time doing a Mad World TFH.

So Q-ko-chan turned out to be two different manga from a translation standpoint. The story that centered around the children which was rather straight forward, and the portion that centered around the military which was as confusing as Ueda-sensei could make it.

The way to get through such a translation is to first do a first pass translation and mark up the places where you don't understand what's going on. (In many of the military scenes, the marks filled up the pages.) Then do a second pass trying to glean from context what the puzzling parts are. The third stage is to contact your Japanese friends and see what their impressions are of the scene. Usually they will be completely baffled by it too, and will not want to help for fear of giving you a wrong interpretation. But they're your only hope, so you can't let them off the hook. All you're looking for from them is their impression as the target audience of what's going on. Get their impression and use it.

But also remember that such books are usually more revealing on second or third readings. Information at the back of the book may help decipher baffling dialog at the beginning. Your Japanese friends won't have the time to read the book two or three times, so that's when you will have to bring your knowledge to the forefront and sometimes override your friend's impressions.

Mad World manga are multi-layered puzzles -- some of which have answers and others which don't. All you can do is write the best translation you can and have your best shot ready at deadline time. My most recent, the first volume of Q-ko-chan should be on the shelves now, so you can see for yourself how well I did. If you understand everything that's going on in it, then maybe I did a too good a job figuring it out...

Posted by dojosensei at 08:17 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

If you sneak into the back of the dojo to that rarely used back room, and slide open the shoji screen, you'll see sensei there staring at the ceiling, or from time to time, pulling out an old computer game and letting his brains drip out of his ear.

Sensei just got back from the extended convention trip and is today recovering. He is catching up on recorded TV programs, erasing the huge loads of e-mail that all seem to have variations on misspellings of the word "viagra," and answering the e-mail that needs to be answered today.

But the dojo is open again. The doors leading outdoors are all open, and the hall is cleaned up and ready for your practice again. Sensei will begin his regularly scheduled ramblings tomorrow, so you can look forward to that. (Or sigh in resignation to the inevitable -- whatever is your style.)

I'll be long-winded tomorrow.

Posted by dojosensei at 01:09 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Yeah, Sensei is finished with the manga death march and is cleaning up the tatami mats, hanging up the honyaku dogi, airing out the back rooms, gathering up the cooler, tents, fishin' poles, and packing up the station wagon.

Of course I won't be ignoring my sensei duties completely. I'll be prowling the San Diego Comic-Con International for a good portion of this break, and I'll have my full sensei regalia on for the Lost in Translation panel on Friday evening. If you're at the con, come up and say hi!

But the dojo will be available only for self training during this two-week break (no parties while I'm gone!! It's no fair to have parties without me), and I'll be back to crack the whip on July 26th or the 27th (depending on how bad the convention/vacation hangover is).

Your assignments are:

Novice, White Belts: Recite your "te" form five times a day.

Novice, Yellow Belt: Engage an elderly Japanese person in conversation at a bus stop.

Apprentice, Brown Belt, 1st Degree: Read Characters and Viewpoint by Orson Scott Card.

Apprentice, Brown Belt, 2nd Degree: Go to SDCC!! This is the con to be at.

Jouneyman, Black Belt, 1st Degree: At the con, hand your card to all manga & anime companies.

Journeyman, Black Belt, 2nd Degree: Just enjoy the illusion of your importance.

Journeyman, Black Belt, 3rd Degree: Buy yourself one new dictionary.

Journeyman, Black Belt, 4th Degree: Introduce yourself, and let's swap stories.

Masters: Tell me how you got there.

Take care, everybody!

Posted by dojosensei at 10:01 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

As a translator, I like to work at a good pace. Having the pages turn along at a certain clip not only makes you money quicker (since translation is often paid per page of manga or per running minute of anime), but it also gives you a sense of accomplishment.

But not everything in translation is a Japanese sentence going into the mind, and an English sentence almost immediately coming out the other side. Certain things can slow that steady pace down to a crawl, and this is what eats up the time of translators.

The first and most common thing that slows a translation down is a word you don't know. The solution is simple, to look it up in the dictionary, but it's more than just plugging in a new word. Your brain recognizes English words from long experience with usage. When there's a Japanese word you don't know, it isn't simply that you don't know the meaning, but you've also (probably) never heard it used before. Which means it takes more time than just looking the thing up, you have to consider it within the context of the sentence. It's more like puzzle solving. I'm not talking hours here, just a few extra minutes per word, but the less Japanese you know to begin with, the more words you have to look up, and that can make a translation stretch into forever.

The second most common is for anime scripts and seinen, josei, and salaryman manga -- kanji you don't know. This is a little more difficult since the method for looking up kanji is far more complicated and time intensive than looking up words by alphabet or kana. It involves knowing the "radical" of the kanji (a small portion by which all similar kanji are referenced), counting the number of strokes used, then looking it up in Nelson's (or some other kanji dictionary). If you know one of the pronunciations for the kanji, then the work is easier, but even then it takes longer than a normal dictionary lookup. If you don't know the pronunciation, don't know the radical, and (usually because the kanji is hand-written) can't figure out the number of strokes in the character, then you're in for a long, long search. Up to twenty minutes on a single kanji, and sometimes even longer. That's a lot of effort for one single word.

Idioms are a constant source of headaches since I haven't found a good, quick dictionary for them. My Wordtank G50 has a way to list idioms that use particular words, but no dictionary, not even the Green Goddess, notes all the idioms. The number of idioms that use the word ki (for spirit or personal energy) are legion. This is a good time for that Japanese friend I mentioned in the Apprentice part of the dojo.

Katakana words. I'll talk about these in more depth in another post, but the basic problem is that the Japanese often take western words and modify the meanings. So not only do you have a foreign word that is in none but the very latest dictionaries, but it often has a different meaning than the word it comes from.

Cultural references can take up a chunk of time. As an example while doing an early volume of Here is Greenwood, (Nasu is notorious for difficult '80s cultural references) two of the main characters had an exchange where one makes a statement, the other replies with "Funôru no ryû?" (Funôru's dragon/lizard?) and the first responds with, "Are ha kansu!" (That's kansu!) (Please forgive my faulty memory, I had to return the Greenwood books to the publisher so I don't have the Japanese original to check.) So I had to figure out what this "Funôru" and "Kansu" were. Dictionaries turned up nothing. I tried a battery of friends, but none of them had any clue. Then at one point, deep into the teens or twenties of the Google lists, there was a website that wrote Funôru in its official English letters, "F'nor." F'nor?! Where had I heard that before? Then it came crashing into place -- it had been more than a dozen years since I had read Anne McCaffrey's Dragon Rider's of Pern series, but thinking it over, F'nor's dragon was named Canth. It had taken probably four or more hours to figure out that one throwaway pun, but at least I was able to. (There were several Nasu references that I was never able to figure out.)

Then there are phone calls, e-mail, and the normal day-to-day activities of one's life. It's a wonder anything gets translated.

Posted by dojosensei at 10:23 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Intelligent translators can manage to work with the editors to naturally schedule a vacation at a chosen time within a year. They do not procrastinate or go beyond their deadlines, and all of their translations come in like clockwork. Intelligent translators are the gems of the industry. How I hate them.

I, on the other hand, am terrible about estimating when I can finish a project, and just as terrible at resisting the lure of time off for a day or two after having sent in a script. And this Summer, even though I knew my annual pilgrimage to the San Diego Comic Con was coming up, I went ahead and scheduled July full anyway. (Bad Bill. Bad, bad Bill!)

So now I have to finish what I would normally finish in three weeks, in just slightly over one. And there's no way to put it off. I know how long it usually take me to do a page in this series, and I'm just going to have to take the time to do it. Get up in the morning, work through until late at night, and go to bed. Get up and do it again.

But we work in a deadline-driven business. (Thank the gods it isn't a daily deadline.) That means that when the time comes, there are going to be working weekends, late hours, and a tired you. Normally, you'll be fine, but every now and again...

Here's the deal. You're on a deadline, and if you get your stuff in late, you're putting the entire process behind schedule. At the same time, you only get paid for the scripts that you turn in, so if you need to pay rent, you'd better get the work in. And finally, vacations are wonderful things, and they're well worth the extra sweat that comes before them!

Okay, back to the march.

Posted by dojosensei at 08:48 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I've been translating manga pretty much constantly since 1991. Right after a year-or-two stint with the fly-by-night company Sun Comics, I parlayed being a published translator into a similarly short stint doing manga and miscellaneous translations for Tokuma Shoten USA which ended in 1994 or 1995 time frame. The next manga I had my name on was in 1998. What was in the middle? Um... Comics that didn't have my name on them.

Most people think that translating porn comics is easy work. That isn't quite true. Sure, the translator doesn't have to dig very far into the dictionary to come up with the dialog. The mangaka know that they aren't supposed to challenge the mind all that much. They're busy challenging...other parts of the anatomy.

Quite honestly, the difficulty with porn is the sound effects and varying repetitive exclamations. As the one writing the words, you will feel a need to give some variety to the sounds that are being made, but really, how many different sounds are there during certain acts? And coming up with the sounds...there are other things that a translator likes to translate more than that.

The first one I translated was three or four people who all wanted to be there and had a good time during the events of the manga. But soon, I was asked to do some series that amounted to being nothing more than rape-rescue fantasy -- but the rescue comes too late. I've been called a prude, but I really don't mind porn where all participants are there voluntarily. But when rape or cruelty became the main factor of the story, I found myself dreading going to the computer to translate the book.

And eventually, that dread lead to the end of the stint. I'd put my anime work before the manga, and all of my manga scripts were beginning to come in late. I'd only do the manga when I absolutely had to do it. At one point I realized just how my attitude was making me deliver less-than-professional work, and I wrote to the publisher saying that I'd like to be taken off of the books. And the publisher, probably thoroughly annoyed with my constantly late performance, quickly agreed.

If anyone is shocked at my doing porn, (or on the other hand, if anyone is fantasizing about getting free, on-the-job porn) please remember that translating porn is not the same as reading it. The focus of attention is on everything other than the images. (There's no need to translate the images.) The translator's focus is on dialog; it's on sound effects; it's on just about everything other than the reason people buy the books.

Posted by dojosensei at 08:07 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Sensei's very first Japanese sensei had a saying, "No translation is no translation." Basically what it meant is that it is the translator's job to put the Japanese concept into English, and if the translator leaves words in Japanese, the translator is not doing what he or she is being paid to do.

That's one extreme of the positions on this idea, but there is a valid point behind it. Human language is made up of concepts that all humans share. There may be points that are relatively more important to one culture than to another (like the Inuit's number of words for snow that everyone has heard of), but there is no concept that one person can think of in one language that a different person can't think of in a different language. Actually, that's the basis for all translation -- that the human mind created language, and if something can be said in one language, it can be said in another.

There is, of course, the opposite extreme. That what is said in a language comes along with nuance and cultural baggage such that no translation can ever be wholly accurate. This is also a valid point. If I said that a couple of celebrities were, "acting like the second coming of Bennifer," then I have just referenced in your mind a few years worth of celebrity gossip that everyone in North America was exposed to. A culture that didn't follow American celebrities would just say, "Huh?" And it doesn't have to be so obvious. Words like, "Y'all" carry a certain cultural baggage that would be very difficult to translate, and even non-dialectical phrases like "Military Institute for Boys" carry certain cultural meanings that the words themselves don't carry. Taking this to a further degree, one could argue that since the culture helps along in the background when understanding a language, no language can hope to be translated and give the same feeling to a reader in another language.

Obviously I don't subscribe to this second extreme, because if I did, I'd hang up my dictionaries in the closet and leave the profession. No, what we translators are working with is somewhere much closer to the first extreme than the second, but there are elements of the second in our translations too.

The fact is most anime and manga fans want a little Japanese in their translation. Although people who buy into the first extreme (and I was one of them for a while) feel that anything that can be expressed in one language can be expressed in another -- it might just take a few extra words to do it -- the truth is we are ultimately paid by our readers forking over their cash to pick up our translations.

I'll tell you where I became a convert to the having-some-Japanese-in-my-translation-isn't-such-a-bad-thing camp. I was editing Fushigi Yûgi for Viz, and someone wrote in about the character Chichiri who ends every sentence with the Japanese sentence-ending particle "no da." (To be technical, "no" is the particle, and "da" is the copula.) It was running in the magazine Animerica Extra which has a letters page, so I ran the letter, and as a response, I said, "I don't know what we're going to do. What do you think?" (Actually, at the time, I was still a convert to the must-translate-everything school, and I was leaning toward leaving the "no da" out.)

It was there that I learned one cardinal rule for working on a letters page. Don't ask a question you don't want to know the answer to. I meant the, "What do you think," as a prompt for people to send in letters to the magazine, but many fans took it as a poll. They put up on websites that I would allow the fans to decide whether Chichiri leaves his "no da" as is or not, and I suddenly got flooded with mail. More than a hundred e-mails a day. Most of them were just writing in without even knowing what they were writing in about. The majority wrote in saying variations of, "you better put no da in teh anima or i never watch!!!!!!!" In other words, people who simply clicked on the link and wrote what they thought the website owner wanted them to say. There were many others who did read the book that used threats such as organizing a boycott of the magazine or coming up with a petition. None of this did anything to change my mind. (It's very easy to become stubborn when confronted by threats.)

Then one fan wrote in saying that she would be made very happy by leaving in the "no da," and it brought me up short. Really. Suddenly I was confronted with a point that I couldn't argue. Making the fans happy is a good way to increase sales. I still feel that if a line of dialog can be translated, it should, but that doesn't mean that a little bit of easy Japanese thrown into the mix is a bad thing. The Japanese do it when there are English-speaking characters in the manga. The foreigner will usually say "Hello," in English, then go on to speak the rest of the dialog line in Japanese. (Although in real life, the only Japanese most foreigners know are the greetings, so the dialog would be the other way around. "Konnichi ha" in Japanese and the rest of the sentence in English.)

Of course the company I do translations for (Del Rey, may their manga ever boom) requires a certain amount of Japanese (honorifics, etc.), so the decision is made for me, but after the incident with Chichiri's "no da," any objections I once had have been quelled.

Posted by dojosensei at 10:03 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Like I said a couple of days back, I'll be hosting a panel for translators at this year's San Diego Comic-Con. This is a recurring panel at the con that I've been setting up for (at least) six of the past seven years. 2003 was a hell year as far as work load was concerned, so I couldn't make it to the con and couldn't find someone else to run the panel for me. But for the four years before and the years since, I've been able to find translators who are both going to the con and want to be on a panel.

David Welsh of Precocious Curmudgeon found my post about the panel on The Engine, a forum set up by the very successful comics writer Warren Ellis that is frequented by quite a few comics industry professionals. In response he said this:

I can't find it on the con's official schedule, but Bill Flanagan mentions a "Lost in Translation" panel over at The Engine that will feature Flanagan (who works on XxxHOLic for Del Rey), Jonathan Tarbox, and Jake Forbes, among others. (No women though, which strikes me as odd. Based on a quick scan of the titles on my shelves, at least half of the translators working in manga are women. Maybe they all devoted their travel budget to Anime Expo? Tarbox and Forbes should guarantee a lively hour, though.)

Since I've heard several other people aside from David wonder at how I determine panelists, let's dispense with a few mistaken impressions about the panel. The panelists aren't chosen by some judge who looks upon all translators and chooses the ones considered most worthy to have a seat on the panel. (I wish!!) The panelists are found by me looking through my list of contacts, sending out the e-mail, and trying to wrangle up three or four people who know, in April, that they will have enough time and money to go to the convention, have an open enough schedule to promise to be at the panel whenever they schedule us, and are willing to speak in public. (Translators spend most of their time alone in front of computers. Public speaking is not a job requirement.)

There is an order in which I contact people, though. I give panel veterans the chance to join the panel before I send an e-mail to someone new. But aside from a year when the entire panel consisted of European comics translator Dwight Decker and myself, I've always managed to get at least one new person on the panel every year. This year will be Jake Forbes' first time.

(On a side note: I love David's blog and am a fan of his balanced coverage of comics and manga. I stop by Pre-Cur pretty much every day.)

To answer one of David's comments, I never even thought of male-to-female ratios this or any year. I was trying my best to get diversity of specialties and diversity of client companies for the panel makeup. I managed to get diversity of companies, but unfortunately most of the translators this year are in the manga field. Charles McCarter will be our anime expert. (Last year I was able to get in anime, games, and European comics into the mix.) As for gender, Julie Davis is something of a panel regular and Trish Ledoux has been on at least one panel in the past, but this year, none of the ladies I was able to contact were coming to the convention.

Besides, as far as I know, gender really isn't an issue in this profession. When I was editing at Viz, which translator did which series was entirely based on availability, and when more than one person was available, what translator's talent would be best suited to the manga. For example, when we were able to license Revolutionary Girl Utena, I knew that the first person to offer it to was Lillian Olsen for the literal translation. I knew that she'd put in the time reading through the series carefully to spot the symbolism. The adaptation went to Fred Burke because he was the best that Viz had in weird or occult-oriented manga. We never really saw the freelancers so it was easy to judge by skill (and on-time performance, of course) rather than any other factor.

Of course, if any translator feels that gender, race, orientation, or other distinguishing feature is a factor in the way translation companies choose talent, please use Contact Sensei and let me hear your thoughts on it. I'd be fascinated to hear other points of view.

Also, if you're a translator in the industry, and you'd like to be on the panel, write to me at Contact Sensei, and I'll add you to my list of contacts. (I can't guarantee you a spot, but I promise that you'll be in the running.) Let me know how long you've been in the industry and the names of some of the books you're proud of.

Still, David is right, Tarbox and Forbes does guarantee a lively hour and a half.

Posted by dojosensei at 09:13 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

To anybody who tried to download the San Diego Comic-Con programming PDF file... um... That was actually last year's file.

Bad Sensei! Bad, bad Sensei!

I've edited the file so that it presently doesn't link to anything.

Posted by dojosensei at 11:43 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

As I mentioned in other areas of the Dojo, the translator's main dictionaries are the Green Goddess (Kenkyusha's New Japanese-English Dictionaries), Nelson's (Japanese-English Character Dictionary published by Tuttle), The Wordtank electronic dictionary by Canon, and some on-line sources.

Here are some of the ones that I don't use quite so often, but can save your neck at times. Note that most of these were bought quite a long while ago. There may be new editions or some might have gone out of print. The ISBNs are the ones on the back of my books. I wish you the best of luck finding them.

Sanseido puts out a set of four Japanese-Japanese dictionaries that can be immensely helpful at times.

Concise Nihon Jinmei Jiten (The Concise Japanese Names Dictionary) which lists historical Japanese names.
ISBN 4-385-15804-5

Concise Nihon Chimei Jiten (The Concise Japanese Place Names Dictionary) which lists all sorts of places in Japan.
ISBN 4-385-15328-0

Concise Gaikoku Jinmei Jiten (The Concise Foreign Names Dictionary) which lists the katakana spellings (kanji for the Chinese people) and a short bio of famous people throughout the world.
ISBN 4-385-15325-6

Concise Gaikoku Chimei Jiten (The Concise Foreign Places Dictionary) which lists the katakana spellings (kanji for China) for countries, towns, rivers, etc.
ISBN 4-385-15335-3

Then there are:
Concise Katakana-go Jiten (Concise Katakana Dictionary) is a Japanese-Japanese dictionary for katakana words, but since the Wordtank just about replaces this, I hardly use it anymore.
ISBN 4-385-13477-4

You need a good standard Japanese-Japanese dictionary because they contain words that the Japanese-English dictionaries don't have. I have Sanseido's Shinmeikai Kokugo Jiten (New Lucid Japanese Dictionary)
ISBN 4-385-13069-5

It doesn't hurt to have a kana-based Japanese-English dictionary. I still own the one I picked up during my college days. Kenkyusha's New Collegiate Japanese-English Dictionary.
ISBN 4-7674-2056-3

The companion English-Japanese dictionary is the only E-J dictionary you will ever need (once you get good enough with kanji to read the entries). Kenkyusha's New Collegiate English-Japanese Dictionary.
ISBN 4-7674-1076-2

This is one I hardly use since Nelson's is so much better, but when I can't figure out how to look up the first kanji in a compound, this one gives you the option of looking up the second or third kanji in the compound. So in that particular case, it's a great fall-back dictionary. Japanese Character Dictionary by Nichigai Associates.
ISBN 4-8169-0828-5

This dictionary is a pain to look anything up in, but it helps when getting into technical names for commonly used items since it also has pictures for every item and they're grouped by specialty (Farming equipment on one page, shipping on another, etc.) The Oxford-Duden Pictorial Japanese-English Dictionary.
ISBN 0-19-864327-6

Since there is no help for Japanese names -- even native Japanese speakers can't be 100% sure of the pronunciation of a name written in kanji -- this dictionary is almost useless. But I did say almost. If you have no choice, and you need the pronunciation of a name, this is the only one that has a chance of giving it to you. Japanese Names by P.G. O'Neill published by Weatherhill.
ISBN 0-8348-0225-2

There's a slightly out-of-date dictionary of Japanese manga creator's names with short bios that's helped me any number of times. Mine was published in 1997. I'll have to see if there is an updated release. Mangaka Anime Sakka Jinmei Jiten (Dictionary of the Names of Manga and Anime Creators).
ISBN 4-8169-1423-4

I was lurking on a forum when I heard about this sound effects dictionary. It's Japanese-Japanese, but it can be very helpful when that weird sound effect that you haven't learned yet comes up. Gendai Giongo Gitaigo Yôhô Jiten (Modern Sound Effects and Onomatopoeia Usage Dictionary)
ISBN 4-490-10610-6

Shogakukan puts out (past tense, maybe?) a dictionary of movie, song, and other media titles. This includes the Japanese titles of foreign movies which are often quite different from literal translations or transliterations of the original titles. Like most media-oriented dictionaries, it's only good up to its publishing date (1997 for mine), but it has often helped when a shôjo author starts talking about that foreign movie that so inspired her. Eeiwa Waei Title Jôhô Jiten (English Title: Shogakukan Companion to Artistic Works).
ISBN 4-09-510192-X

Oh! And be sure to get Kodansha's bilingual maps of Tokyo, Osaka, and all of Japan. They've saved my butt plenty of times.

Of course they aren't all of my dictionaries. I have some completely useless ones (a small medical dictionary hasn't given me one word that wasn't better documented in the Green Goddess in the 10+ years of hopefully looking things up) and others that have been replaced by better dictionaries above. But you have to be something of a dictionary junkie to be in this business.

If you know some useful dictionaries that I haven't mentioned, get onto the Contact Sensei page and let me know about them! Now, dammit!

Posted by dojosensei at 10:08 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Need to work on School Rumble (which, considering the amount of panels, balloons, jokes to get right, and Japanese culture that I need to research to make sure that I know what I think I know, takes up quite a lot of time), so I'm going to take a break from my standard set of essays today.

But instead, I'd like to invite any of you going to the San Diego Comic-Con International over the weekend of the 20th through the 23rd to come to my annual Lost in Translation panel on Friday at 5:30 in room 1B. Not only can you hear me repeat everything I've said on this site (kind of like a bookstore reading -- yes, I am kidding), but you also get the insights of Charles McCarter who has been a Bandai anime producer for forever, Jonathan Tarbox who is not only an accomplished translator with an innovative business model, but also has the distinction of having been responsible for two different manga lines, and Jake Forbes who seems to be assigned to every hit manga from CLAMP's early successes to Viz's Fullmetal Alchemist runaway hit. (It's looking like Nobby Matsuo, our resident games expert, might not be able to make it, but that leaves room for a surprise guest!)

If you need more convincing, a pdf of the schedule for the rest of SDCC's live programming is here.
Edit: No, it isn't here. I had linked to the 2005 schedule. I'll update you all when it can be accessed.
Edit X 2: Yes, the schedule is here, but this is the HTML version rather than a pdf. I'm sure a pdf will be put up soon.

LOST IN TRANSLATION
FRIDAY, JULY 21
5:30-7:00pm
ROOM 1B

Lost in Translation-- Foreign entertainment has taken the comics and animation industry by storm in the past several years, and with the heightened interest, it's a good time to see how the process works. Long-time translators and producers explain the nuts and bolts of translating in the American entertainment industries such as comics, manga, anime, and games. Join William Flanagan (xxxHolic), Charles McCarter (Ghost in the Shell: SAC), Jonathan Tarbox (Angel Sanctuary), Nobby Matsuo (Samurai Champloo: Sidetracked), and Jake Forbes (Fullmetal Alchemist) for stories and Q&A!

If you're a frequent member of the dojo, come up and let me know after the panel!

Posted by dojosensei at 08:28 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

I've mentioned in a few places on this site that you really can't afford to quit your day job when you're starting your translation career. I've tried. Really. There was a point going into the mid 1990s when, living in Tucson, I managed to pay rent and utilities and eat for a year or two. But I had no healthcare, and I saved absolutely nothing. My apartment was made up of college-student furniture, and the most expensive thing I owned was my Toyota Tercel. Then, hoping to get better translation jobs, I moved to Los Angeles, and with month after month of not getting better translation work, I broke down again and got myself a day job.

About a year or so later, one of my friends at Viz mentioned that there was an opening in their editorial department. I went up to San Francisco to interview.

Honestly, starting work at one of the manga/anime companies means that you will have to give up translation. You will (most likely) become an editor, and that skill set is completely different than the one you learn while translating. And if you get the job, you'll have to learn it quick. I needed to learn how to spell above the 4th grade level; needed lots of crisis management skills; needed to coordinate creative people (no mean feat, let me tell you); and whole hoard of other skills. But they are learnable -- I just had to apply myself (which means study like a demon).

Aside from being able to have regular paychecks and suddenly having healthcare again, it also gave me the benefit of finding out what really goes on in a manga/anime company. When I started asking for work from the outside again, this information was invaluable. I was also able to make large amounts of contacts within the industry, and I finally was able to pay off the enormous debts I racked up from months of living in Los Angeles without a day job.

Somehow I was able to do translations while I did my editing, but by the end, that was just not possible. It wasn't just that I was Editor-in-Chief, after 2002 the industry changed and there was just too much work to spend any of it on things that could be done just as well by freelancers. Everyone in the department was even more overworked than they were before. But the people working there were some of the best people I've ever worked with. Creative, funny, sometimes sarcastic, mostly upbeat, and if anyone didn't love manga when they started, they learned how to love it pretty quickly. Aside from the slave-like hours, crushing pressure, and massive workloads, it was a dream job.

But there was a point where it became clear to me that if I ever wanted to translate again, I had to step out of my position. So I did.

I doubt I would have been able to do translation as a full-time job without spending my time as an editor at Viz. I know that some people can make the jump to full time without having the inside view of how an editorial department works and having made friends in the industry, but I'm just glad I didn't have to be one of them.

Posted by dojosensei at 05:45 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The old Anime Con, which was a convention held in San Jose that was the forerunner of the present-day extravaganza (going on right at this moment), Anime Expo, was the first anime convention that I was able to attend as a professional. Since the industry was so young, they actually invited me to speak on a translator's panel after only about a year and a half of professional experience.

On the panel, one of my fellow translators mentioned that he never read any translated material. He only wanted to experience manga or anime in its original, unsullied form, and didn't want to experience it through the eyes of somebody else.

Whereas I can understand his motivations to a certain extent, I disagreed with him then as I still do now. There's a lot to be gained for a translator in reading other translated works.

The fist benefit is perspective. In reading translated works (especially subtitles where one can see the translation at the same time as hearing the original Japanese) you begin to get a feeling of what constitutes a "valid" translation and what one would consider "out of bounds." That is, a "valid" translation is that kind of translation where "you can get there from here." By which I mean, if the words in Japanese say something, and you can get much the same meaning from the translation, then it's valid. If it adds information that isn't there, or takes out information that is significant, then it falls into the "out of bounds" area. I mentioned this briefly in the Bad Translations entry, and I'll try to go into it in more depth in a later post. Suffice it to say that reading other people's translations gives you perspective on translations as a whole.

But the thing I like to do most when reading someone else's work is to mine for translations. Everybody has what is called an idiolect. That is a personal vocabulary that you use in your speech. But the number of words you commonly speak is far smaller than the number of words you understand -- and a different mind than yours might come up with more elegant solutions to a translation problem than you might. For example, there was a time during the subtitling of one of the Ranma movies where the sophisticated character Nabiki mentions that someone's clothes are out of fashion. My company subtitled the work and our rewriter, Jay Parks, came up with "That's passé." I was floored. I never thought of that translation, but it was perfect for the character and the situation, but it was also very short as well (perfect for subtitles).

Similarly, when watching one of the first Ranma episodes Toshi Yoshida and Trish Ledoux translated a line of Ranma's when he said, "iinazuke da, ichiô," as "She's my fiancée... more or less." It was the first time I had heard "ichiô" translated that way, and since, it has become my preferred way of translating the word.

That's what I call mining a translation. It's best done with subtitles for the reasons stated above, but it can also be done with manga and dubs as well. Sometimes, just the phrase in English can tell what the original words were in Japanese. The idea is to keep your antenna up for words or turns of phrase that you would personally like to use. Then you remember them and wait for your chance. There were phrases that I waited years for a chance to use (but when I finally got to use them, it's a feeling like completing your collection).

My response to the translator on the Anime Con panel was, "You don't read other people's translation? But that's the best place to steal other people's ideas!!"

Posted by dojosensei at 09:34 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

You've been working on a fun series with killer artwork for a number of volumes, and the publisher comes to you with a request to translate a companion book. (An art book, or the guide book to the anime, or the trivia book, or some such). They offer you a fee that's better than you would usually get paid for translating a normal graphic novel and ask you for an estimate on how long it will take you. You look at it (assuming it's an art book) and see big pages with nothing but pictures (and perhaps a little descriptive paragraph). Sure, there's that section in back where they go into detailed description of the characters and have an extended interview with the author, but just think of all those pages with those very big pictures! And after a cursory reading of the text -- it doesn't look all that hard! So you give them an estimate that allows a little more time than a normal graphic novel. They accept. And you get to work.

The huge picture-only pages go breezing by. You spend a little extra time on the descriptive text because they're supposed to sound poetic, so you overwork your Thesaurus to be sure you get it right. Life is going swimmingly.

Then you hit that back section, and you're in a translation from hell. Your entire world bogs down in the quagmire of words. Yes, WWII fans, you have just plowed through Poland, and you're suddenly confronted with Russia. The words aren't that difficult, it's just like there's so many of them. Whereas you went through dozens of "big picture" pages in a day, your first "lotsa text" page takes the entire day, and you still aren't finished with it.

Suddenly the descriptions use words you didn't notice in the cursory reading. Words that are of some odd dialect of which you are unfamiliar. You ask the Japanese friend who sometimes helps you out on your worst translation problems. "Oh, that's a dialect they use up near Sendai," your friend informs you. The research university library should have a dictionary of that dialect, but it's nowhere to be found (it's in the card catalog, dammit!). You turn the page, and there, waiting for you, are more words.

The deadline comes and goes, and you've only made it through five pages of the 20-page section. And facing you are even more words! The words have surrounded you like brain-hungry zombies, and they want to eat you alive! (Or at least, eat up your time.)

The weird thing is, these TFHs are usually very helpful when you go back to translating the series. You often learn great things in the interview section, or pick up details you might have overlooked in the descriptions that the Japanese editors write. When I translated the Patlabor movies (for the initial Manga Entertainment release), every line of dialog was either very informative and made the story better, or very funny, but there were so many lines! It took me a full day to get through only 5 running minutes of dialog. (I could do an entire Dancougar episode in less than 3 hours.)

But you have to accept the assignment. You're the translator on the series, and nobody (but some of the fans) knows the series better than you do. Fortunately, they don't come along too often, but they'll come along, and you just have to put in some long nights to get it done as quickly as you can. Slog through it, and you'll have a story to tell to other translators later on.

Posted by dojosensei at 05:42 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

As I mentioned in the Prospect's page, when you start out as a translator (and even well into your career), there isn't enough money in translation to pay the rent. I was living in a very inexpensive town (Tucson, AZ), and I could only barely make it at the rate I was paid. And after 2002 when the model for manga publishing changed from releasing pamphlet comics first and graphic novels later over to an all-graphic-novel strategy, the rates for translators went down.

So when you start out, translation will be your side business. You won't be able to quit your day job. Still, if you love manga and anime, this may not be such a bad arrangement.

Once you have started freelance work, your taxes will become more difficult to manage. Sorry, that's just the way it is. But here's the good thing, you will wind up paying less taxes as a translator with a day job. Here's how to do this thing right.

-- Your day job should be able to pay for 100 percent of your gas, car payments, insurance, health care, and any non-anime/manga-related hobbies, and at least 90 percent of rent and utilities.

-- Your day job shouldn't be creative since translation is creative and you don't want to come to your translations drained.

-- Your day job should not require much in the way of overtime.

If most of the above is taken care of, here's the strategy. You should have a room devoted to your home office, and the percentage of space that room takes up in your apartment/house should be charged to your translation business for rent and utilities. Your future video equipment should show anime most of the day and be considered a part of your business. Your anime hobby is now research material. Your vacations should be taken at anime/manga/comic conventions (they usually choose cities with lots of attractions).

And here's the biggest part of the strategy: while you have a day job, your translation business should be run at a loss for as many years as the IRS allows it to be. (When I was following this strategy, the IRS required your business to have a profit one year in every five.)

Getting a break on taxes isn't that wonderful a thing since you still have to pay out the money. But if you were going to get that plasma TV anyway, isn't it better that you don't have to pay taxes on the money you used to buy it? If you were going to visit family in Los Angeles, couldn't you schedule it for somewhere around the 4th of July when Anime Expo is running? And if you're a holic of xxxHolic, wouldn't it be better to not pay taxes on the money you spend on the series?

When (and if) you go full time into translation, you won't be able to follow this strategy anymore since you will be paying your rent, utilities, car expenses, etc. with your translation pay, so you will have to run at a profit from the business standpoint. Day jobs withhold tax money, but with translation, you will have to pay taxes out of you own pocket (as it were).

Oh, and do find a system for keeping receipts that works for you. I've had years where my "system" consisted of Spring Cleaning my apartment on April 14th so that I can find those receipts that slid under the couch -- and I don't recommend it.

Posted by dojosensei at 06:38 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)