More than translation
By Geoff Botting
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おかしな日本を伝えたい
日本の週刊誌の記事を英語で紹介する仕事に携わっているボティングさん。
この作業は、一般の翻訳に比べて3倍から4倍の時間がかかる。
しかし日本の流行や風変わりな側面を、日本だけではなく、世界の読者に伝えるこの仕事は、かかる時間や労力に見合う価値があるという。
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Of all the different types of translation work I do, none is as time-consuming and labor-intensive as my contributions to the Tokyo Confidential column. Time-wise, the work takes about three or four times longer than other translations of comparable length. Why? Because we try to rewrite the articles from the weeklies in completely natural English that will keep readers of The Japan Times entertained.
It all begins when we choose which three stories from the latest crop of weeklies. Although the weeklies provide a surfeit of material each week, much of it is unusable to us. Topics such as celebrity gossip, the latest horse-racing developments, and pachinko tips are generally not of interest to our readers. We also don't touch topics of a universal nature. The suspected health danger of excessive cell-phone use is one example.
So what stories work best?
Trends, for one. Japan is a society of "booms," and I'm always looking for stories that describe purely Japanese trends while in their earliest stages. One such mini-trend was "eropuri," which got started in the summer of 2003. This involved teenage girls and young women using purikura machines (photo booths) at video arcades to take pictures of themselves in sexy and provocative poses. The girls would usually be in some stage of nudity during the shooting.
"Purikura allows (the girls) to easily enjoy themselves by making them feel like sexy models, in the same way that karaoke makes people feel like they're famous singers," said an expert who was quoted in an article.
An editor once said to me, "Your stuff is translated from Japanese, but it doesn't read like translation at all. How do you do it?" The answer was: quite a bit of work. Once an article is selected, I read it all the way through to get a general understanding of it. The following day, I read it again, this time taking notes and underlining the parts of the story I like best. I then write a 500- to 600-word item from the notes. So the source article is effectively my notebook.
This process takes a lot more time and imagination than most other translation work, which often involves a sentence-to-sentence recasting of the source material. But in the end, the extra effort is worth it. Although the stories are not my own, I like to think I play at least some role in conveying to readers, not just in Japan but throughout the world, what's hip, happening and weird in Japan.
Shukan ST: November 16, 2007
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