I was thinking about how my Golden-Week-centered vacation happened to coincide nicely with a lull and then a subsequent surge of work when it occurred to me that it would probably be a good idea to look at the company work schedules of the past and see if there is enough consistency in workload fluctuations to create some kind of seasonal busyness chart. Such a chart would probably be a very handy vacation planning tool.
2008年5月アーカイブ
I used to assume that translating a technical document such as a user's manual for an oscilloscope would always be easier than translating a well-written novel. The reason for this is that while every word in a literary masterpiece may be packed with meaning and nuance, an instruction manual tends to be more straightforward.
But after further thought and experience, I've concluded that one of the special challenges of technical writing is that the translator must always be clear. When a master novelist writes an unclear sentence, we can assume that he intends for the sentence to be unclear, thus the job of the translator is to write a similarly ambiguous sentence, but when an engineer writes an unclear sentence in an instruction manual, we can usually just assume that he had a hard time expressing the concept that he was trying to convey, and then it's up to the translator to figure out what the engineer was really trying to say.
This can be a trying process. I've pointed out countless mistakes to clients in my less than one year working as a full-time translator. This helps the client to know that you understand the material, and it is probably good for business in the long run, but it also takes up a good deal of time. Recognizing that a sentence is unclear usually only takes an instant, but then I have to explain to the client why the sentence is unclear and ask them how they would like to clarify it. This is time I could be spending translating something else and making more money. I'm hoping though that in the long run, the time I invest into this process of improving upon the clarity of the original document will not only be good for business, but will also make my own writing lucid enough to make even most novelists jealous.
But after further thought and experience, I've concluded that one of the special challenges of technical writing is that the translator must always be clear. When a master novelist writes an unclear sentence, we can assume that he intends for the sentence to be unclear, thus the job of the translator is to write a similarly ambiguous sentence, but when an engineer writes an unclear sentence in an instruction manual, we can usually just assume that he had a hard time expressing the concept that he was trying to convey, and then it's up to the translator to figure out what the engineer was really trying to say.
This can be a trying process. I've pointed out countless mistakes to clients in my less than one year working as a full-time translator. This helps the client to know that you understand the material, and it is probably good for business in the long run, but it also takes up a good deal of time. Recognizing that a sentence is unclear usually only takes an instant, but then I have to explain to the client why the sentence is unclear and ask them how they would like to clarify it. This is time I could be spending translating something else and making more money. I'm hoping though that in the long run, the time I invest into this process of improving upon the clarity of the original document will not only be good for business, but will also make my own writing lucid enough to make even most novelists jealous.
In this blog I am going to discuss aspects of my job as a Japanese to English technical translator. I've been working for about a year now as a translator, but I used to do translation occassionally for my previous job as well.
Once I started translating full time I noticed that my eyes were getting very tired at the end of each day. It wasn't that I wasn't used to reading in Japanese, as I'd been reading novels rather frequently for many years, but rather that translation is just harder on the eyes than ordinary reading. For most of the day my eyes have to dart back and forth between my two computer screens as I search for the best possible way to express some Japanese term or concept in English. At first this was a daily problem, and I was worried about possible long-term effects, but now my eyes are fine even at the end of a very long day. One reason is simply that my eyes have become stronger, but I also owe much of my newfound comfort to these simple steps that I took to take some of the burden off of my eyes:
1. Make text bigger. I regularly set the text size in word processors and PDFs high enough so that the text I want to read just barely fits into the screen, or sometimes even larger than that. Bigger text = happier eyes.
2. Close your eyes when thinking. When I used to stumble across a difficult to translate passage, I would keep reading it until I thought of a good translation. Now I read a passage until I understand it, then I close my eyes so that they don't keep wandering over the passage as I'm thinking about how to best render it in English.
3. Use search features as much as possible. Skimming through a document to find a particular word or passage puts lots of strain on your eyes. It's always better to just let the computer do the searching for you. You can also save time by remembering search keyboard shortcuts and making new shortcuts of your own.
4. Excercise. I find that getting up and moving around for even just a few minutes works wonders for my eyes. I suppose that the increased circulation helps to reduce muscle fatigue.
Once I started translating full time I noticed that my eyes were getting very tired at the end of each day. It wasn't that I wasn't used to reading in Japanese, as I'd been reading novels rather frequently for many years, but rather that translation is just harder on the eyes than ordinary reading. For most of the day my eyes have to dart back and forth between my two computer screens as I search for the best possible way to express some Japanese term or concept in English. At first this was a daily problem, and I was worried about possible long-term effects, but now my eyes are fine even at the end of a very long day. One reason is simply that my eyes have become stronger, but I also owe much of my newfound comfort to these simple steps that I took to take some of the burden off of my eyes:
1. Make text bigger. I regularly set the text size in word processors and PDFs high enough so that the text I want to read just barely fits into the screen, or sometimes even larger than that. Bigger text = happier eyes.
2. Close your eyes when thinking. When I used to stumble across a difficult to translate passage, I would keep reading it until I thought of a good translation. Now I read a passage until I understand it, then I close my eyes so that they don't keep wandering over the passage as I'm thinking about how to best render it in English.
3. Use search features as much as possible. Skimming through a document to find a particular word or passage puts lots of strain on your eyes. It's always better to just let the computer do the searching for you. You can also save time by remembering search keyboard shortcuts and making new shortcuts of your own.
4. Excercise. I find that getting up and moving around for even just a few minutes works wonders for my eyes. I suppose that the increased circulation helps to reduce muscle fatigue.
