I had initially entered my first job as a translator / interpreter on a remote island in Nagasaki with the knowledge that I would have to surmount the hurdle of learning the local dialect. I was familiar with an array of Japanese dialects through reading fiction set in places like Kumamoto or the Kansai region,…
A puzzling myth I’ve come across after coming to Japan is the idea among other foreigners that the JLPT N1 is some esoteric test filled with impractical, obscure knowledge. This idea confounds me personally as someone who passed the N1 several years ago without ever having opened a practice workbook or guide related to the…
I distinctly recall the first time I had to interpret. A cruise ship had arrived from France and its captain had written a speech addressed to the townspeople. The interpretation was from English to Japanese, rather than the Japanese-to-English I had much more confidence in. Regardless, it was still something I had been prepared for.…
Since coming to Japan two years ago as a Japanese-to-English translator, I’ve been wanting to start a blog for the four other people on this planet who care about the extraordinarily specific field of programming’s use in translation (although I will talk about other stuff too, probably). AI has come up frequently in the translation…