da_ni_e_ru Wrote:I'm thinking, for example, of purchasing The Routledge Course in Japanese Translation as well as Studies in Modern Japanese Translation. This is partly because I want to translate Japanese fiction later on, but also because I think it may approximate the sort of valuable lectures you were able to attend.

The texts you refer to are both from schools with prestigious Japanese literature programs, so they're likely to be quite helpful.

However, if you want to translate fiction, the best thing you can do is study Japanese literature at an elite university. Fiction, especially literary fiction, is usually translated by academics with PhDs. Keep in mind, a PhD is primarily about research, not translating. Nonetheless, you're going to need one if you even want to get near someone like Yoshimoto Banana, let alone the likes of Osamu Dazai.

If you want to translate popular fiction or genre fiction, an MA in Japanese literature or appropriate Japanese language credentials and a MFA in creative writing may be enough. Again, both of these degrees primarily involve doing things unrelated to translating.

Furthermore, since it's hard to come by translation work in fiction, you'll most likely need to supplement your income by specializing elsewhere as well. Unfortunately, some of the best paying specializations - such as law, finance, and medicine - are also the least fulfilling.

Also, although you probably already know this, I'll point out that translators usually only translate from a source language to their native/target language. Therefore, you'll probably have an easier time finding good English, not Japanese, texts for translating Japanese to English. That's not to say there aren't Japanese texts for translating Japanese to English, but those texts target a native Japanese audience, and so may be of limited use.

I don't know much about fiction translation, but I suggest checking out TranslatorsCafe and ProZ and searching for threads about that topic and translators who work in that field.

da_ni_e_ru Wrote:Since I have what fiction (and non-fiction) to read covered, I was just wondering what you would recommend as a substitute for those lectures you had where your teacher went over nuances of the language with you.

I'm thinking, for example, of purchasing The Routledge Course in Japanese Translation as well as Studies in Modern Japanese Translation. This is partly because I want to translate Japanese fiction later on, but also because I think it may approximate the sort of valuable lectures you were able to attend.

Anyway, I'm sure there are some good books in Japanese for this. I just don't know which ones. And you may have some good advice as you know much better than I what was covered in that class!

I'm going to start this reply with something that someone will probably be unhappy about-- I'm sure those translation books have many good points and very very few errors. I can't imagine you *not* benefiting from reading them. However, as long as Japanese is being explained to you by means of another language, you probably won't get the same effect and shades of nuance as you would having the same thing explained by and for Japanese native speakers.

The Japanese resources for this kind of thing would probably be 国語 textbooks for late middle school or high school students..

The lectures were great but it was just an old Japanese guy going over newspaper editorials 100% in Japanese. They were mostly focused on newspaper abbreviations and terms but there were helpful tidbits all over the place for nuance. It was like consulting a thesaurus every couple of lines only without the need to actually have a thesaurus. And far more entertaining. He always liked to start the class with a random story or rant completely unrelated to the class itself. I miss that guy. He also liked to talk about why は was used in place of が in a certain passage and the importance of using は・が・も effectively as an educated speaker of Japanese. .. little things like that as we went along. Now I've forgotten all the explanations but the ability to use them correctly has stuck around. This is unfortunate when I try to explain anything but fortunate when I'm just using Japanese myself.

It was honestly just an accelerated, advanced 国語 class for adults who just happened to be foreigners. 国語-lite, if you will. Forget all the kanji and grammar and get right down to understanding the finer points. Unfortunately, I don't think you can actually buy Japanese textbooks.. but there are plenty of online resources. And you can find a lot of the same information by searching a word or phrase on Google and reading some of the questions Japanese people have posed on sites like chiebukuro.

If you want the same effect I'd suggest becoming best friends with a thesaurus and a site like chiebukuro and reading until your brain melts.



As for translation, I've never studied translation so I have no idea!
But, what I can say is that it is very obvious when someone was still thinking with their native language crutch while translating. I'm currently reading A Song of Ice and Fire in Japanese because I had an itch for fantasy and saw it in a bookstore. The revised version that I'm reading is done quite well but there are quite a few obvious moments where the translator simply didn't quite know what to do with an all-too-English thought process. I imagine this was also partly in the interest of time.

Good translation more than ever requires the ability to *think* in Japanese. If you just want to communicate that's cool, but a good translation has to take into account what the author was thinking and not just what words spewed forth from his typewriter. This is important even in English when reading literature. The words are one thing- how they're being used is another. This is what our English classes tend to consist of in High School in the US and this is why I liken my experience in those lectures to something like 国語lite.

The older texts, certainly, would require a lot of research. However, most of them have been translated already. 8)

drdunlap Wrote:The older texts, certainly, would require a lot of research. However, most of them have been translated already. 8)

If you're talking about well-known, classic texts, then you're correct. However, there are plenty of unknown texts that have yet to be translated.

Article on Robert Campbell, Professor of Japanese Literature, Tokyo University Wrote:While at Kyushu University, Campbell had the opportunity to explore the rural areas to sort out and catalog, for example, the library of an Edo Period feudal lord, where there were over 1,000 books that no one had touched for 200 to 300 years.

Link to article

Furthermore, according to Campbell, even Japanese themselves are unaware of a great deal of remarkable Edo-era literature.

Oh of course there are a ton of untranslated things. I guess I just assumed he meant more modern shtuff and/or shtuff that has a demand for translation. Anyway, as I know nothing about that world, I'll leave my advice to tricking the brain into thinking Japanese isn't a foreign object. ヽ(´ー｀)ノ

Actually that reminds me of what one of my professors used to say about Daoist texts. What the world knows about Daoism is some incredibly and ridiculously low percentage because no one has bothered to go and translate the innumerable texts about this, that and the other. And even in China, different people own different texts and learning all about it would take a lifetime or twelve.

/unrelated blabber off.

I liked the story, let me share mine, too.

I started with Japanese in October 2010 and tested all kinds of stuff.
Pirated Rosetta Stone and was bored to death somewhere around level 2.
Did Pimsleur and Michel Thomas.
A lot of JapanesePOD and some audio vocab drill thing.
I did smart.fm when it was free, tried out Memrise, tried ANKI again and again and couldn't like it.
I read some grammar books for fun (yes, I do find them fun, but I stop when they start to bore me), also chatted a ton with Japanese people via Twitter and then Facebook.

When I moved here in March 2013, I was already pretty all right, and with my focus on audio, I was kind of the opposite of you: My listening comprehension was top notch, my vocabulary decent, and I moved from "listening to real life Japanese tires me" to "what language did I just listen to?" in about 3 months.

And all this time, I was illiterate
(all I could do was read and write in Hiragana and Katakana, which is already more than many learners can do, because writing them is a different skill from reading).

Just before Xmas, I decided to finally make Kanji my ally instead of trying to avoid them (or get real good at "reading" with Rikaisama^^) and started Heisig, and although I'm only halfway through so far, I can already read a lot, just because I saw so much stuff so many times, and my Japanese is at a pretty high level.

So when I'm done with this, I plan to read through all kinds of middle school novels from the library, because those usually have a lot of furigana, and get used to the most common readings.

From there on, our paths will cross, I guess.

What I tried to show with that is, that, while I doubt my level is comparable with yours, I learned to a level with which I can lead a comfortable life in 100% Japanese (sans literacy) using a completely different approach, but in the end, we all end up doing the same stuff eventually, to climb above that plateau you will hit at some point, where you get 100% of spoken Japanese, but can't get any further, because well, real life Japanese really isn't that hard.

Since this looks like a totally different way to go at it from yours, I thought I'd just write it down here (without going too much into detail), just to show that "whatever works for you, just do it".

I forgot to add that I also enrolled in a language school when I came here, for the visa, in order to marry my girl (who had to wait for her "divorce cooldown timer" of 6 months after she finally got it done).

I didn't really learn a lot there, but I got to chat with the teachers and the classes there reinforced what I already knew and weeded out some of my mistakes.

I graduated, too. The graduation test was equivalent to the JLPT1 in every point. I did the 読解 by just guessing through the text and "getting the gist of it" and "educated guessing" with a mix of knowledge from Heisig, endless chatting with Rikaisama and being experienced.

This is my graduation certificate. I finished 上級A.
http://s7.directupload.net/images/140211/m36w3yqx.jpg

First off, thank you Vileru for that detailed response! I want to translate for myself next year and have a few modern short stories that haven't been translated yet in mind, but if I decide to make a career out of it after that what you wrote will be very useful.

drdunlap Wrote:Unfortunately, I don't think you can actually buy Japanese textbooks.. but there are plenty of online resources. And you can find a lot of the same information by searching a word or phrase on Google and reading some of the questions Japanese people have posed on sites like chiebukuro.

If you want the same effect I'd suggest becoming best friends with a thesaurus and a site like chiebukuro and reading until your brain melts.

So, Chiebukuro it is! I'll also see if I can't find some Japanese middle school teacher posting videos on YouTube of her 国語 classes.

Oh, and as far as translation goes, I think you have to read what the author wrote very carefully and understand it completely, but then you also have to be able to relate what the author said in your own language while retaining as much as possible how the author said it.

That is not easy. And I expect to have a hard time of it. But I like playing with words and I like the stories that all those words add up to, so I'm going to give it a shot. The worst that could happen, after all, is that I'll spend a lot of time thinking very carefully about what the authors I like are doing (which means my life will continue on as usual).

drdunlap Wrote:I'm currently reading A Song of Ice and Fire in Japanese because I had an itch for fantasy and saw it in a bookstore. The revised version that I'm reading is done quite well but there are quite a few obvious moments where the translator simply didn't quite know what to do with an all-too-English thought process. I imagine this was also partly in the interest of time.

I love Fantasy and have tried to pick up Japanese fantasy (mostly English -> Japanese, but also some original Japanese fantasy) but they have SO MANY words that I'd never seen before and only seemed to be fantasy related. I get that when you read fantasy words like fireball and dragon scales aren't words you see in every day use, but I recall looking up way more words than when I read Murakami.

Are you having difficulty with fantasy compared to normal fiction?

captal Wrote:

drdunlap Wrote:I'm currently reading A Song of Ice and Fire in Japanese because I had an itch for fantasy and saw it in a bookstore. The revised version that I'm reading is done quite well but there are quite a few obvious moments where the translator simply didn't quite know what to do with an all-too-English thought process. I imagine this was also partly in the interest of time.

I love Fantasy and have tried to pick up Japanese fantasy (mostly English -> Japanese, but also some original Japanese fantasy) but they have SO MANY words that I'd never seen before and only seemed to be fantasy related. I get that when you read fantasy words like fireball and dragon scales aren't words you see in every day use, but I recall looking up way more words than when I read Murakami.

Are you having difficulty with fantasy compared to normal fiction?

I've played some Final Fantasy in Japanese as well as Skyrim so I'm somewhat used to it. The main source of unknown words are all the types of trees and stone, jewels and the like that come flying out in the descriptions. Fantasy authors sure do love vividly describing things. Even then, I wouldn't say it's particularly hard. At first it's just breaking into a new genre and it's all downhill from there. I do have a very small list of words like 歩哨 (sentry) that pop up again and again and are quite often used in this sort of fantasy.

I know you get offhand comments from the resident curmudgeons hereabouts, but I gotta at least thank you for motivating me to watch all of One Piece. I hadn't found an anime that was rewarding enough and had enough episodes to build the topic-specific vocabulary to understand one show. A tablet and bluetooth earphones means I never really sit and watch, it's more of an accompaniment to my cooking. Anyway, cheers/乾杯サー！

Sticks n' stones sticks n' stones!

To be honest, I kinda had a 食べず嫌い thing going on with One Piece for a long time and I'm not sure why. There's a reason it's been going for more than 10 years.. !

I used to listen to Hideo Kojima's podcast while cooking. ヽ(´ー｀)ノ

Is the One Piece anime worth picking up when it's been going on for so long that it feels like I'd be a thousand episodes behind? I've been going through Legend of the Galactic Heroes/Ginga Eiyuu Densetsu (main series: 100 episodes, with sequel OVAs bringing the count closer to 150) after being recommended it by a friend, and it's going to take a long time, but I like all the details and things that longer series can pull off which shorter series can't. I was thinking of trying One Piece, but being that much behind, and the series seeming like it will never end makes the prospect of watching it seem daunting.

I am at little past episode 200 of One Piece. I tried to read the manga along with the show but gave up. I just started the manga again and I'm really enjoying it now that I know the story and the vocabulary. So I've grown to like the show more not less over time.
The characters are all lovable with interesting back-stories (the banter gets recycled sometimes when the show takes plot liberties that aren't in the manga).
The concept: ルフィーは海賊王になる男だ。He is 楽 and kinda stupid, but he always goes all out when it comes protecting his 仲間 or defending what's right and trusts his instinct. His crew usually lands on some island where all kinds of fantastical stuff might exist, but also usually some tyrant or otherwise power-hungry megalomaniac who is taking advantage of a people who have a strong and important heritage that is usually explained by some wise old man who might also be good at kicking ass (ぶっとばす) and eventually the pirates rescue their town from the bastards and dispel preconceived notions of pirates.
And the opening theme songs are great, not so much the ending themes for some reason.

It's a good show. If you can find it to watch I'd recommend it. 600+ episodes is a lot but, if you get hooked, it's great for listening.

I've watched it up to episode 570 or so with my girlfriend. She's Japanese and not especially into manga/anime (and I am definitely not, I've never seen anything else and it was at her insistence) but most people in Japan seem to enjoy the show--adults included. My boss recently bought some One Piece crap for my school, and all the kids know all the characters and I've heard more than a few times from the younger ones about how mom or dad are obsessed with the show.

It's tiring at times, some story arcs can be dragged on forever, Nami's boobs seem to grow a cup size every 100 or so episodes, a lot of story is definitely aimed at children, and much of the dialogue starts to get old as you see it over an over again. Most attempts at stirring up sympathy and compassion for the characters are rather clumsy and I find myself flinching often. Overall I'd never say it was amazing, but it's definitely watchable, frequently charming, and even emotionally-engaging on occasion. I, a grown-man, have even cried at one particularly intense story-arc conclusion.

I'm going to watch it all again without any subs once I finish Core6k and see how I go.

afterglowefx Wrote:I'm going to watch it all again without any subs once I finish Core6k and see how I go.

Ah the version I have is hard subbed. It's hard not to read English when it's there but I'm trying.

tashippy Wrote:

afterglowefx Wrote:I'm going to watch it all again without any subs once I finish Core6k and see how I go.

Ah the version I have is hard subbed. It's hard not to read English when it's there but I'm trying.

I know it's not ideal, but if you're stuck with hard subs, you can always put a piece of heavy paper over them. Personally, I just avoid hard subs entirely, since I can't keep myself from looking at them.

I'm actually trying Japanese subs with an anime (not One Piece, since I haven't seen a full set of subs), which are possibly more distracting than English subs, since my listening abilities are terrible and I have to rely on the subs to get almost anything out of the anime.

I have found the most success when I stick with the same anime long term. This allows your brain to focus on the sentence forms once you pick up the vocabulary, speech patterns and catch phrases of the show an it's characters. I guess it's like the lazy version of Subs2SRS. When I started watching One Piece, I relieved on the subs a lot, but now I only really need them once every couple minutes. Indeed it's hard not to read English when it's written on the screen. I have become accustomed to flash reading when a line flashes on the screen so I don't block out my listening by sub vocalizing. So you sort of get an estimate of the meaning and fill in the blanks in your brain from not having read closely by listening. I have become a bit selective with what subs I pay attention to, and the rewind button has become a trusted ally. fwiw I've found that Diceplayer is the VLC Media Player of Android (you can swipe left to go back and right to ff) in terms of simplicity and willingness to play any file format/codec.

drdunlap Wrote:Incredibly In-Depth Unnecessarily Long Version


-- My Japanese took its final huge jump AFTER I returned to the US but this post is long enough already. I may explain in depth later when I'm feeling masochistic but here's the short version:
Found FC2 Live. Read 7.5 more novels. Read newspaper every day. Played 5 games in Japanese. Went through job hunting, a break-up, and a fairly nasty period of self reflection- all in Japanese.

My first post and it's reviving an old thread. Anyhow, so you feel liking explaining in depth now lol? Honestly the length didn't really bother me. It was a good read. How did you finally make that last jump?

moejam Wrote:My first post and it's reviving an old thread. Anyhow, so you feel liking explaining in depth now lol? Honestly the length didn't really bother me. It was a good read. How did you finally make that last jump?

!! I forgot all about that. Haha. Well, I did give the short version. I think that the only thing requiring any explaining is FC2 but first I'll just run through what I did real quick...

Basically, once I returned to the US from my time studying abroad in Kobe, my brain entered panic mode (read: "active study mode") because I was no longer in a near-100% Japanese environment and I could tell I wasn't quite far enough yet...
I felt like I was in a cart going up a mountain that wasn't quite at the top yet. If I stopped going forward I felt like I'd slide full-speed back to the bottom.

So I just made sure to keep my Japanese exposure to a maximum. Most every day I: did Anki, listened to a good 30 ~ 60 minutes of podcasts (this news podcast comes out every weekday so that's handy), watched something in Japanese on YouTube or FC2, read at least 20 pages in one of my novels, played some Japanese games, attended class (in Japanese. super easy content but at least the lecture was Japanese).

However, my biggest secret during this time was probably FC2 Live.
I don't remember how I found it but I was still in Japan at the time. Probably when I was looking for One Piece episodes.
TV, games and books are great for learning Japanese but I really wanted more of that delicious, broken Japanese that people actually use in everyday conversation. Turns out the internet is full of that kind of thing. During this time I mainly watched the しょうもない (how do I say that in English..?) broadcasts of people just chatting in front of the computer. So it was like a group discussion where only one person was actually talking and the rest were typing. (Although sometimes people did Skype conferences and the like.)

I started on the chat side of things and just watched how people interacted for a while (several months, probably). Since they were all native Japanese it was incredibly useful. It was basically just a never-ending supply of conversational Japanese. I then slowly started joining conversations in chat and eventually found myself Skyping random people and even broadcasting from time to time as well. This helped to complete the Japanese environment I had while living in Kobe and took my cart of Japanese ability far enough up the mountain to finally feel safe. The best part is that I was getting to watch Japanese natives interact with each other without the filter that my less-than-perfect Japanese and obvious not-being-a-Japanese-person-ness placed on most of my interactions while I was an exchange student. By the time I started participating in chat I was natural enough to continue going unnoticed.

I'm not sure what would have happened had it not been for those chat rooms. I imagine my ability to quickly and native-like-ly produce Japanese would have continued to lag severely behind the rest of my abilities until I returned to Japan.

I still watch broadcasts through FC2 quite a bit but now I mainly use it to watch TV shows and anime with a chat attached. It can be quite entertaining to watch something like Dragonball Z with several hundred Japanese people in the chat making jokes.

The only big progress to speak of after returning to Japan is that I have become irrevocably Kansai-ben-ified because I live and work in Kansai and have continued to soak up Japanese from my surroundings. It's really entertaining to look back at my old Facebook posts and messages and the like and see how incredibly 標準語 I was. I do need to do some more active study, though.

Oh well..

Don't know if that was helpful! Maybe! Hopefully!? I guess all I did was introduce FC2 Live (again?). It's a handy site.

Very helpful as usual, DrD. I've been kind of stuck in a rut since I got back from Japan a few years ago. I've gotten better, but progress is just... slow. I'm stuck in that no-man's-land between N2 and N1, and I'd really like to bust out of it. Thanks for posting what worked for you. It's extremely helpful!

Totally useful! Appreciate the information.

Thanks a lot for sharing your story, it really motivated me to start doing something instead of trying to find the "perfect way" to do it (I'm too much of a perfectionist, ugh)
I have a (maybe stupid) question though. You shared your card layout for vocabulary but I was wondering, how did you approach grammar? I'm finding really hard to put grammar on anki and effectively studying it because I have no idea how I should structure my cards. So I'd be very thankful if you could give me some insight on the matter. Thank you very much in advance.

Thanks for the kind words, dizzyS.

All of my grammar cards looked different depending on where I was in my study but they all follow the same general idea- my "study" came from my initial encounter with the grammar point in the wild or in a textbook and the card just served to remind me of that grammar point's existence. I included the explanation but only looked at it during Anki reviews if I couldn't remember how the grammar worked when a card came up. If I could remember I just glanced at the example sentence(s) and moved ahead.

Must-have points of my grammar cards:
1. Short-and-sweet explanations. (+Japanese explanation if possible).
2. Example sentences. Example sentences. Example sentences!
3. (Later (N1) cards only) Two cards for each grammar point. 1 Recognition + 1 Recall (but the same contents on each side).

My Tae Kim cards from very early in my self-study (when I couldn't read Kanji very well) look like this. I'll use ~がち as an example:
~がち One
~がち Two
~がち Three

I basically just took the short and sweet explanation from the site (usually in the little green box for the appropriate grammar rule) and put it, along with a fully-kanji-fied example sentence, on one side and the sentence by itself in all Kana on the other side. I also made sure to get a few different examples of the same grammar being used in different ways and made multiple cards. (I think the multiple cards trick helped really refresh my memory with this early grammar study because I would see the same grammar point multiple times). Later textbook grammar ended up in the same format only with all Kanji (and more sentences) on the example sentence side and the reading of the kanji on the explanation side. (Example from "An Integrated Approach to Intermediate Japanese")
(Looking at this now I realize that Anki automatically put "にっぽんじん" on the furigana of that card. How patriotic(?) of it. :x)


Later in my study, when I threw in a book of N1 grammar points, the cards looked something like this:
~ずじまい as an example.

So one side is the grammar point as it appeared in the book along with the instructions on how to use it and several example sentences, all in Japanese. The other side includes the Japanese explanation of the grammar and (if I could find it) a short-and-sweet English translation. It may seem like a lot of info for an Anki review but I basically did this so I could do away with the book. I hardly ever read the explanations after the first few times seeing a card and just let Anki refresh my memory ("Hey! This grammar exists! Remember it!?") spaced repetition style. Lots of reading and using did the rest of the solidifying.

Ahh that was a nostalgic look down Anki-lane. I haven't seen any of those cards in years!
I'm mildly sleep-deprived at the moment so I hope this post makes sense... haha. But, once again, I'm just telling my story as I remember it! I can't promise it'll be helpful!!

Thank you very much for this detailed reply to my question! I really appreciate it! (and it definitely makes sense, thank you so much for writing all of this!)
I searched everywhere for an insight on grammar cards and it's wonderful to have a starting point to go on! I'm annotating all of your helpful tips right now!
I'm just having a little problem though, I can't see the links you posted. It's giving me some kind of permission error? I'm not sure if it's my problem though, as apparently a lot of people are having the same issue with google (it's this error), so I'm not sure what's happening! And all of this after you had all the work to post them...

Oops! I just changed all the links to photobucket. Hopefully that works!