The other day I was asked by a translation agency to "evaluate" / examine an online questionnaire, supposed to be done among foreigners (in Japan) trying to find certain restaurants. My job was to find out, how "easy" to use several different search sites are.
Tasks (in an Excel file) were formulated for example like:
★Use the restaurant search website "XXX" to search for a single restaurant offering food you would like to eat.
★Once you find a restaurant offering food you would like to eat, please complete the following survey.
So far, so fine.
BUT ...
People were supposed for certain (specific) restaurants and then asked:
"Based on your experience using all the sites, which provided an easy-to-understand display of restaurant information?"
Well ...
Let's say, you were looking for a Chinese restaurant in Osaka, that has the name:
"中国料理北京 ホテルグランヴィア大阪店"
Assume for a minute, that those foreigners (supposed to be tourists) do NOT speak/read Japanese.
In that case it is unlikely that they ENTER the above term in the search field.
But MAYBE they would enter the name of the restaurant, which is displayed in roman letters like:
"CYUUGOKURYOURIPEKIN HOTERUGURANVIAOOSAKATEN"
All foreigners here, who either CAN read the above, or would even ENTER that mumble jumble to search for the given restaurant ... please raise your hands.
Nobody???
Strange .................
Is it not absolutely clear to EVERYBODY, that:
* "CYUUGOKU" stands for China, pronounced in Japanese "chuugoku"
* the terms "ryori" (cuisine) and "Peking" are TWO (not one)
* everybody who is NOT Japanese would expect "Hotel" instead of "HOTERU"
* again: GURANVIAOOSAKATEN is at least THREE different words, that should appear as such when written in roman letters!
* this last thing glues "guru navi" (search site), Hotel, Osaka and Branch together to give the hillarious: HOTERUGURANVIAOOSAKATEN
PLEASE ... Japanese people!
If you want to communicate with the world / or have the world communicate with you ....
you have to do better than that!!!
6/22/2014
WHO Standard Terminology
The WHO has edited and published what it calls a "Standard Terminology" (sort of a dictionary) pertaining to oriental medicine:
"WHO International Standard Terminologies On Traditional Medicine in the Western Pacific Region"
That is just fine. AND all the listed editors are without question highly decorated academics. THEY are surely better educated and much more knowledgeable than I will ever be.
Nevertheless .. I cannot help but feel somewhat disappointed by this work - at least regarding some terms.
Example.
"1.6.84 瘀血 = STATIC blood = a pathological product of blood stagnation, including extravasated blood and the blood circulating sluggishly or blood congested in a viscus, all of which may turn into pathogenic factor, the same as blood stasis or stagnant blood."
The rendering of what the Japanese pronounce "oketsu" as "static blood" is to my taste highly inappropriate. EVERY persons working in the medical field and MANY laymen know perfectly well what happens, when the blood STOPS (completely) to move = becomes "static" (static means NOT moving).
The tissues deprived of their blood supply will quickly develop functional disorders and not much later DIE!!! Typical example: myocardial infarct.
But ... THAT is NOT what is meant when people talk in oriental medicine about "oketsu"!
I myself are not an academic and definitely not qualified to argue with these editors and propose a more suitable term.
Yet, I think, these people SHOULD come up with something more appropriate and as it is, all those academic decorations have produced unsatisfatory results.
In particular when one considers what is being attempted here: facilitation of communication between completely different cultures and concepts.
I expect, I will make myself many new enemies with this statement ...
"WHO International Standard Terminologies On Traditional Medicine in the Western Pacific Region"
That is just fine. AND all the listed editors are without question highly decorated academics. THEY are surely better educated and much more knowledgeable than I will ever be.
Nevertheless .. I cannot help but feel somewhat disappointed by this work - at least regarding some terms.
Example.
"1.6.84 瘀血 = STATIC blood = a pathological product of blood stagnation, including extravasated blood and the blood circulating sluggishly or blood congested in a viscus, all of which may turn into pathogenic factor, the same as blood stasis or stagnant blood."
The rendering of what the Japanese pronounce "oketsu" as "static blood" is to my taste highly inappropriate. EVERY persons working in the medical field and MANY laymen know perfectly well what happens, when the blood STOPS (completely) to move = becomes "static" (static means NOT moving).
The tissues deprived of their blood supply will quickly develop functional disorders and not much later DIE!!! Typical example: myocardial infarct.
But ... THAT is NOT what is meant when people talk in oriental medicine about "oketsu"!
I myself are not an academic and definitely not qualified to argue with these editors and propose a more suitable term.
Yet, I think, these people SHOULD come up with something more appropriate and as it is, all those academic decorations have produced unsatisfatory results.
In particular when one considers what is being attempted here: facilitation of communication between completely different cultures and concepts.
I expect, I will make myself many new enemies with this statement ...
Suspicious
I have been critisized in the past for assuming that a certain job offer might well be fraud, because its details were almost textbook style scam.
Well, today I received another of those things, that look at least TO ME very suspicious.
"Hello ... have a project extended of 2 Lakh words where we need german & swedish native speakers with good experience for long term.
Project Details
Language : German & Swedish
Words : 2 Lakh
Domain : Business
People who can do Sample to be done of 900 words apply here."
A "sample" of 900 (???) words?
Nobody who anything about translation (the people who are supposed to "evaluate" those samples ...) needs almost 5 pages of text to assess the capabilities of a potential translator. I can tell from experience!
So, if these people insist on their 900-word sample, place their job offer worldwide, get maybe 100 people to do such "sample", the company in questions already gets 450 pages of translation done for free!
Am I really the only one, to whom this sounds strange?
Well, today I received another of those things, that look at least TO ME very suspicious.
"Hello ... have a project extended of 2 Lakh words where we need german & swedish native speakers with good experience for long term.
Project Details
Language : German & Swedish
Words : 2 Lakh
Domain : Business
People who can do Sample to be done of 900 words apply here."
A "sample" of 900 (???) words?
Nobody who anything about translation (the people who are supposed to "evaluate" those samples ...) needs almost 5 pages of text to assess the capabilities of a potential translator. I can tell from experience!
So, if these people insist on their 900-word sample, place their job offer worldwide, get maybe 100 people to do such "sample", the company in questions already gets 450 pages of translation done for free!
Am I really the only one, to whom this sounds strange?
5/31/2014
Do it!
A message receive the other dayä
"Dear Translator
Please translate the sentence below into Japanese
What do you approx. spend on bras in a year (in Yen)?
Regards"
Is it only me?
I get this message from an Indian company (EZEE NURSING SOLUTION PVT. LTD.) asking me (probably a lot of other people too) to translate something, but DOES NOT indicate, that it is willing to pay for this. If so, how much etc.
Just this "demand": translate the following ...
Since I consider translation a "business", this strikes ME as odd ...
Or am I just crazy?
"Dear Translator
Please translate the sentence below into Japanese
What do you approx. spend on bras in a year (in Yen)?
Regards"
Is it only me?
I get this message from an Indian company (EZEE NURSING SOLUTION PVT. LTD.) asking me (probably a lot of other people too) to translate something, but DOES NOT indicate, that it is willing to pay for this. If so, how much etc.
Just this "demand": translate the following ...
Since I consider translation a "business", this strikes ME as odd ...
Or am I just crazy?
5/01/2014
The Indian miracle .. again
A job offer on an internet site says:
"1. Japanese to English 10 Lacks words, deadline is 7th May, 2014
We will pay for this job 0.11 EUR per word"
Note:
A lakh or lac (/ˈlæk/ or /ˈlɑːk/; abbreviated L) is a unit in the South Asian numbering system equal to one hundred thousand (100,000; Scientific notation: 105). In the Indian numbering system, it is written as 1,00,000. It is widely used both in official and other contexts in Bangladesh, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. It is often used in Indian, Pakistani, and Sri Lankan English.
Well then, May 1 is already over and the people have 1 million words. If 200 words are considered one page = 5,000 pages
-> in 6 days (naturally; God too worked only on six days and rested on the seventh ...)
That will be only 830 pages a day.
"Piece of cake" comes to mind.
BUT ... if you can make it, you will earn 110,000 Euro = 152,739.29 USD in just one week.
So, jump to it!
"1. Japanese to English 10 Lacks words, deadline is 7th May, 2014
We will pay for this job 0.11 EUR per word"
Note:
A lakh or lac (/ˈlæk/ or /ˈlɑːk/; abbreviated L) is a unit in the South Asian numbering system equal to one hundred thousand (100,000; Scientific notation: 105). In the Indian numbering system, it is written as 1,00,000. It is widely used both in official and other contexts in Bangladesh, India, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. It is often used in Indian, Pakistani, and Sri Lankan English.
Well then, May 1 is already over and the people have 1 million words. If 200 words are considered one page = 5,000 pages
-> in 6 days (naturally; God too worked only on six days and rested on the seventh ...)
That will be only 830 pages a day.
"Piece of cake" comes to mind.
BUT ... if you can make it, you will earn 110,000 Euro = 152,739.29 USD in just one week.
So, jump to it!
3/28/2014
"Big job frenzy" -> Update
The "Big job frenzy" continues! On and on and on and ...
By now everybody is not only in a frenzy, but also desperate.
Every day I am getting messages from all over the world, ALL translator
sites list an unending stream of "job offers" pertaining to this thing,
AND ... everybody is offering peanuts as payment.
Since most of those people are NOT going to meet the deadline, by now everybody is getting desperate and I get phone calls almost everyday also from all over the world.
Again offering peanuts at first, but when I say no, the offer switches to "we pay you whatever you want".
Now, THAT is very fishy!
One of the first messages came from the giant slave market "Transperfect". During one of the many phone calls I received from TP, the person on the other end said: "TransPerfect is the ONLY allowed/authorized to work on this project".
If that is/were true, how come I am getting millions of messages from all sort of companies? Only one of those company mentioned, that is is a "member of the TransPerfect family" (sounds like "mafia").
Most of the companies located in India, China, Arab countries, South America etc. started by offering 0.03 USD/word. Now that they find themselves in trouble meeting the deadline(s), the offer suddenly jumps by 100% to 0.06 USD/word, which is still only 50% of a half-way decent offer for orthodox language combinations like English/German, French/English etc.
The "whatever you want" thing happened through a conversation over the phone. A call from a company in Egypt. They first offered 0.07 USD. I said no. Next offer was 0.08 USD. But when I still said no, the person offered: "we pay you whatever you want".
Maybe I not getting this right, but somebody (everybody?) seems to be not telling the truth. If they are not explicitly "lying, they still apparently are trying to coax translators in doing their work for peanuts and withholding "what is right" as a last resort measure.
I don't know about everybody else, but I have the greatest problems recognizing this as "honest work". To me it looks much more like an attempt at deceiving / cheating the translators ...
frenzy,MILLION,job,rate,RUSH,slave,peanuts,deceiving,cheating,deadline,desperate
By now everybody is not only in a frenzy, but also desperate.
Every day I am getting messages from all over the world, ALL translator
sites list an unending stream of "job offers" pertaining to this thing,
AND ... everybody is offering peanuts as payment.
Since most of those people are NOT going to meet the deadline, by now everybody is getting desperate and I get phone calls almost everyday also from all over the world.
Again offering peanuts at first, but when I say no, the offer switches to "we pay you whatever you want".
Now, THAT is very fishy!
One of the first messages came from the giant slave market "Transperfect". During one of the many phone calls I received from TP, the person on the other end said: "TransPerfect is the ONLY allowed/authorized to work on this project".
If that is/were true, how come I am getting millions of messages from all sort of companies? Only one of those company mentioned, that is is a "member of the TransPerfect family" (sounds like "mafia").
Most of the companies located in India, China, Arab countries, South America etc. started by offering 0.03 USD/word. Now that they find themselves in trouble meeting the deadline(s), the offer suddenly jumps by 100% to 0.06 USD/word, which is still only 50% of a half-way decent offer for orthodox language combinations like English/German, French/English etc.
The "whatever you want" thing happened through a conversation over the phone. A call from a company in Egypt. They first offered 0.07 USD. I said no. Next offer was 0.08 USD. But when I still said no, the person offered: "we pay you whatever you want".
Maybe I not getting this right, but somebody (everybody?) seems to be not telling the truth. If they are not explicitly "lying, they still apparently are trying to coax translators in doing their work for peanuts and withholding "what is right" as a last resort measure.
I don't know about everybody else, but I have the greatest problems recognizing this as "honest work". To me it looks much more like an attempt at deceiving / cheating the translators ...
frenzy,MILLION,job,rate,RUSH,slave,peanuts,deceiving,cheating,deadline,desperate
3/23/2014
Japanese-English glossary
Three years ago I posted the below text on an acupuncture forum (http://acmac.net/forum/), where it has been viewed about 300 times ... although nobody is responding ...
Maybe it can be seen from my profile, that I am apart from being a (German) acupuncturist practicing for 30 years in Japan also a translator.
During my translation work, I occasionally also get work related to oriental medicine. Here comes the problem then.
To the best of my knowledge (I did a rather extensive search), there is only one VERY little Japanese-English Dictionary of oriental medicine.
So, during translation work I do rely on several "standard" Chinese-English dictionaries and other source. If I find something that suits the context, as well as my interpretation of the matter, I note that term in a spread sheet. Including items like:
-> Chinese characters / Japanese reading in Kana / romanized Japanese reading / English translation / alternative translation / romanized Chinese reading / links (if any) / pictures (if any) / comments / discussion.
(I am thinking of adding German translations too)
My question / request:
Are there any people on this list that speak/write Japanese, who might be willing to help me by contributing a few possible terms?
Wordwide everybody tends to believe that Chinese acupuncture (or oriental medicine in a wider sense) is the one and only "authentic" branch in this field of knowledge. However, it is common knowledge and need not to be detailed here, that in China EVERY piece of information is censored. There is absolutely no reason to assume, that oriental medicine is an exception.
If the world then has access to only one (permissible) interpretation, it very much restricts its horizon.
Here in Japan nobody (I mean of people in power and with influence) really gives a "r**ts a**" about oriental medicine. That precisely provides for real freedom of speech. And given the fact, that there is a 1500-year history of oriental medicine here, the Japanese have quit a bit to say, that differs from the Chinese points of view.
Even with basic concepts like yin and yang, I am always under the impression, that interpretations vary. Therefore the use of Chinese-English dictionaries does not provide satisfactory results when translating Japanese material.
* Material: the Japanese have a funny way of collecting all sorts of "material". To the best of my knowledge (again), the largest collection of Buddhist sripts is found in Japan, the largest character dictionary of the world has been edited by a Japanese and is standard issue in every library. I would have to check, how these superlatives read in correlation to classic oriental medical scripts, but I would not be surprised, if they have here a larger collection .....
And if they do, you could be rather sure, that those not replicas modified to suit communist party guidelines.
I would like to help make some of these materials available to the world. The Japanese themselves are apparently not very keen to do so.
And if anybody could help me out with hints at possible translation (I can provide the file I made so far), this could be a first step.
I also have a lot of fancy ideas (dreams) about other = further aspects, but maybe I should not get ahead of myself.
Thank you.
Thomas Blasejewicz
Maybe it can be seen from my profile, that I am apart from being a (German) acupuncturist practicing for 30 years in Japan also a translator.
During my translation work, I occasionally also get work related to oriental medicine. Here comes the problem then.
To the best of my knowledge (I did a rather extensive search), there is only one VERY little Japanese-English Dictionary of oriental medicine.
So, during translation work I do rely on several "standard" Chinese-English dictionaries and other source. If I find something that suits the context, as well as my interpretation of the matter, I note that term in a spread sheet. Including items like:
-> Chinese characters / Japanese reading in Kana / romanized Japanese reading / English translation / alternative translation / romanized Chinese reading / links (if any) / pictures (if any) / comments / discussion.
(I am thinking of adding German translations too)
My question / request:
Are there any people on this list that speak/write Japanese, who might be willing to help me by contributing a few possible terms?
Wordwide everybody tends to believe that Chinese acupuncture (or oriental medicine in a wider sense) is the one and only "authentic" branch in this field of knowledge. However, it is common knowledge and need not to be detailed here, that in China EVERY piece of information is censored. There is absolutely no reason to assume, that oriental medicine is an exception.
If the world then has access to only one (permissible) interpretation, it very much restricts its horizon.
Here in Japan nobody (I mean of people in power and with influence) really gives a "r**ts a**" about oriental medicine. That precisely provides for real freedom of speech. And given the fact, that there is a 1500-year history of oriental medicine here, the Japanese have quit a bit to say, that differs from the Chinese points of view.
Even with basic concepts like yin and yang, I am always under the impression, that interpretations vary. Therefore the use of Chinese-English dictionaries does not provide satisfactory results when translating Japanese material.
* Material: the Japanese have a funny way of collecting all sorts of "material". To the best of my knowledge (again), the largest collection of Buddhist sripts is found in Japan, the largest character dictionary of the world has been edited by a Japanese and is standard issue in every library. I would have to check, how these superlatives read in correlation to classic oriental medical scripts, but I would not be surprised, if they have here a larger collection .....
And if they do, you could be rather sure, that those not replicas modified to suit communist party guidelines.
I would like to help make some of these materials available to the world. The Japanese themselves are apparently not very keen to do so.
And if anybody could help me out with hints at possible translation (I can provide the file I made so far), this could be a first step.
I also have a lot of fancy ideas (dreams) about other = further aspects, but maybe I should not get ahead of myself.
Thank you.
Thomas Blasejewicz
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)