Translation ResourcesHere's a list (by no means complete) of resources I use or have used and considered useful in my career as a translator. Since I'm generally translating to or from Japanese, that's the focus of this page. So if you're interested in translation but to/from a different language, the sections that might apply to you are "Other Books," "Theoretical Works on Translation," and "For New or Aspiring Translators." For beginning translators of Japanese, people who think they might want to be translators of Japanese, or translators just wanting to check out what I've used and see if it's anything they haven't stumbled across yet, here you go: Online Dictionaries Kenkyusha Online Dictionary - I consider this to be just about the best Japanese/English dictionary on the web. (It also does English-Japanese, but I don't use that feature often and cannot comment on its quality.) It's an evolving dictionary, which means that new words are added to this online dictionary as Kenkyusha reviews them for use in its hard-bound dictionaries. The drawback is that KOD is not free. It's a paid service; you can see their fee schedule here. Goo Dictionary and Yahoo!Japan Dictionary - These are both free online dictionaries which can also be quite useful. I used them both extensively before I switched to KOD, and will occasionally peek at them now. The dictionaries they are based on are somewhat different, which means if necessary you can often get two different sets of examples or two explanations which may vary slightly and assist you by contrast. Goo's Japanese-Japanese dictionary also seems to make an effort to keep on top of new words. Jim Breen's WWWJDIC - I never use this dictionary to look up normal words. For everyday word lookup, in my experience it's a great dictionary for college students and others (I personally was in love with it in college), but it should eventually be replaced by the above dictionaries when you get to the level where you can use them to good effect. However, there are a couple of reasons for even more advanced users to sit up and take notice of Jim Breen's. First, if you use ACCESS-J, you can do English-Japanese lookup there even on a computer which normally cannot view Japanese. This can save you if you desperately need to look up something but you're at Grandma's on her old computer that won't read Japanese webpages, etc. Second, they have online kanji lookup featuring multiple different lookup methods, which can be very useful--both to beginners and to those of us who may not be beginners but are suddenly confronted with some ridiculously rare character we've never seen before and have left our kanji dictionaries at home. Finally, there are a couple of specialized dictionaries in the word lookup page which might help you out of a pinch, and the site periodically adds more. Real-World Dictionaries Casio EX-word (model XD-R6100, click here for photos) - This is my trusty electronic dictionary. Most of the Japanese students I met at college in Japan had some form of handheld electronic dictionary, and all we foreign exchange students quickly figured out that we needed to take advantage of Japan's huge electronic dictionary market. They're much lighter than bound printed dictionaries and they can often have even more content. I love my handheld--it can save me from most emergencies, it weighs practically nothing, and in a pinch it'll fit in the back pocket of my jeans. I take it everywhere I go. Because electronic dictionaries are such a huge deal in Japan, you have many brands and models to choose from and the features they offer can vary wildly. My XD-R6100 was cutting-edge in 2002, which of course means it's from the Stone Age in technology years. So I can't tell you what to run out and buy right now if you want a handheld. Furthermore, what's great for me isn't always great for everyone. I recommend buying after looking at a wide variety of models to get a feel for what kinds of things you need and like. I know I have friends that can't deal with my dictionary, and when I've occasionally borrowed handhelds from others I've been driven to madness by their setups. But for me, my beloved Casio was probably the best $240 (that was in 2002, your price may vary) that I ever spent. The Green Goddess - Many of us in the trade agree that this is the definitive Japanese-English print dictionary. Its real name is Kenkyusha's New Japanese-English Dictionary or 「新和英大辞典」. The print version is mammoth and expensive; there's also now a CD-ROM version that's conveniently non-mammoth and slightly less expensive. It's absolutely fabulous and I was thrilled and honored to receive a copy of the fourth edition from a friend when he upgraded to the fifth edition. Its coverage is great, its definitions are great, its examples are great. However I will say that I generally utilize the Green Goddess when I'm either unable to connect to the internet or just want to feel the reassuring sensation of paper in this paperless world. However, I use KOD (see above), which is essentially the online Green Goddess. If I were restricted to other online dictionaries I imagine I would caress her pages more often. The New Nelson Japanese-English Character Dictionary - This is the second of two kanji dictionaries I bought in college, both of which got more than their money's worth of mileage in their day, both of which I still own, and both of which I will still occasionally crack open if the kanji lookup in my electronic dictionary just isn't cutting it. The New Nelson is famous, and rightly so, for being a freakin' bigass kanji dictionary, if you'll pardon a little French. Its formidable strength is intimately connected with its formidable size; it contains an almost overwhelming number of compounds for an almost overwhelming number of kanji. Off the top of my head I can't remember any occasion where a kanji I knew was real wasn't in the New Nelson. But I think there was one. Once. Probably. However, there is a reason it supplemented rather than replaced my first kanji dictionary... NTC's New Japanese-English Character Dictionary - This was my first kanji dictionary and is STILL the one I recommend when Japanese students ask me, "I'm a beginning Japanese student looking to get a good four years or more out of a kanji dictionary. What should I buy?" With about 3,500 entries, it is certainly not as exhaustive as the New Nelson. But it covers all of the "everyday use" (i.e., if you know these kanji you should be able to handle most newspapers and magazines) kanji and more, and it is set up completely differently than the New Nelson--and most other dictionaries out there. For starters, it has multiple lookup systems. This means that if you're dealing with a kanji that contains 6 different radicals and you just can't figure out what the hell radical you're supposed to use to look it up, it doesn't matter. You can look it up a different way. And if you screw up the stroke count, you may find it anyway--NTC contains many "common mistake" entries to tell you "you counted wrong, but we know what you mean; go to this page instead." Second, and this is another reason I haven't abandoned it for the Nelson, in its compound examples it includes examples of words that both begin and end with a given kanji. The New Nelson will only give you compounds that begin with the kanji you're looking up. Finally, for learners of Japanese it also includes useful features like stroke order diagrams to allow you to properly write each character. Again, as I've said, I more often use my electronic dictionary for kanji lookup these days, but for anyone looking for hardcover kanji dictionaries, NTC and the New Nelson have been good friends to me. Other Websites Shigo.com - This is a searchable dictionary of slang from bygone days. Things to keep in mind: it's not a professional dictionary; the entries and examples are made by everyday people like us and therefore the dictionary's completeness, depth and accuracy are not going to be professional-grade. Coolness points: this can sometimes find you words you don't easily find in other dictionaries, and it can be a pretty good guide to how "normal people" probably used specific slang terms. And since people can submit entries, it's got continual possibilities for growth. The YYH Djs in English sound effects list - YYH Djs in English was a site around on the net through about 2003 which contained, you guessed it, scanlations of Yuu Yuu Hakusho doujinshi. The truly awesome thing about this site was that, since it transliterated rather than translating the sound effects, it had a list of sound effects used in the various doujinshi and what they indicated. It was great because, unlike many other sound-effect resources, it had information about not necessarily the dictionary-meaning of a sound effect but how it actually got used in real doujinshi, which is cool and useful linguistic data helpful for newbies and even sometimes not-newbies. Sadly YYH Djs in English no longer exists on the web, but several sites which do still exist have hosted the same list: http://www.oop-ack.com/manga/soundfx.html is one of them, and here's a Dutch website with the same information (still in English; it's the rest of the website that's in Dutch). The University of Virginia Library's Japanese Text Initiative - Sometimes in the course of a translation you come across one or two lines quoted from a classical text which, if there is no established English translation or you cannot access/use an established translation for whatever reason, you have to translate yourself. And you can't do that in a vacuum. You need to know the context of those lines in the story. The Japanese Text Initiative takes texts which are not bound by copyright and posts them on the web so that students and scholars may freely read them. For the anime This Ugly Yet Beautiful World I used the Text Initiative to access the full text of 雨月物語, enabling me to ground myself in the context enough to produce a responsible translation of the lines from 雨月物語 that Hikari and Takeru's teacher quoted in their Japanese class. Google Japan - When you can't figure out for the life of you what it means and it's not in any dictionary, there's just no substitute for Google. If you just Google the term itself, you'll see usage. If you get a bit smart and creative in your searches, you can often find definitions or explanations online. Other Books 現代擬音語擬態語用法辞典 - A Japanese-Japanese dictionary of onomatopoeia. I regularly steal it from one of my illustrious coworkers. It has usage examples, meanings, and a rating for whether the word has a negative, positive, or neutral connotation. I'm not sure how it compares to similar works, but I've found it quite useful and easy to use. The Synonym Finder - I find the traditional thesaurus to be a pain in the ass. The Synonym Finder does basically the same thing you need from a thesaurus (give you different ways of expressing things) with a lookup method that doesn't suck (it lets you look up words just like you would in a dictionary). Theoretical Works on Translation I personally feel that in order to be the best translator you can be, or perhaps even to be a good translator at all, you have to have some kind of theory about what translation means, in general and to you specifically. It also helps to have a theoretical tool chest you can use to tackle certain kinds of common problems. I think some people may be able to arrive at a mature, dynamic, and fully-formed theory of translation on their own, but most of us would probably benefit from some background or some ideas to jumpstart us. Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida and The Craft of Translation - Although translation studies is an expanding field that has more written about it all the time, for starting out I recommend these two companion volumes that were assigned reading back in the Translation Seminar class I took at Swarthmore College (I was a Bryn Mawr grad, but I took most of the classes in my major over at "Swat"). For one thing, they're collections of essays, which means you get to hear different voices with different opinions. For another thing, the essays cover all kinds of different types of translation. It's not just poetry or just literature. For New or Aspiring Translators Those thinking about the profession, please check out my So You Want To Be A Translator page. For Anime Translators in Particular D2_STATION - This site is very useful for translating credits, because it contains complete credit lists for many anime shows (both opening and ending credit scrolls). Note: DO NOT SIMPLY TRANSLATE FROM THEIR LISTS. You still have to actually watch the credits on your own video source, since there are occasionally errors on this site. However, it is still absolutely glorious because it often means you can copy and paste names you have to Google (assuming you've confirmed the name on the site matches the one on the credit scroll). In addition, if the video source given to you is of substandard clarity you can use it as a guide to help you figure out what exactly those fuzzy, illegible kanji might be. 役に立たないアニメーション用語集 - Contrary to what its name would lead you to believe, this site is pretty damn useful. It's a list of terms relating to the television and animation world and their definitions. This kind of stuff is particularly handy for interviews or video extras where creative staff discuss technical aspects of things. A Google search for アニメ用語 or アニメーション用語 will bring up other lists which may cover different words or offer differently-worded definitions. It's good to have a grip of animation-related terms and their definitions in English as well, but Japanese-Japanese lookup can be extremely useful, since some terms don't exist in English or mean somewhat different things than their English counterparts. The Anime News Network - The Anime News Network has a vast encyclopedia of anime, manga, and the people involved in creating and releasing both. It's a somewhat Wikipedia-style affair, which among other things means it will NOT always be accurate and should never be taken as the final word for anything. Rather, it should be considered a source of base information which you research in other ways to confirm. It is also not by any means complete. However, with those caveats, it can be very useful for anime translators when we run across references to other anime, particularly with helping us figure out what an anime with a given Japanese title is best known as in the United States. It's also the most comprehensive English-language catalogue of released and unreleased titles you'll find on the Web. Becoming an Anime Expert - I know, maybe you're thinking "but I'm an anime fan, I already know about anime." Well, okay, but let me ask you this: have you seen Gundam and Sailor Moon? Can you name five manga by Osamu Tezuka? What show defined today's harem anime tropes? What show immortalized the line お前はもう死んでいる? If you can't answer one or more of those questions, you may be knowledgeable for a fan but your knowledge probably needs some beefing-up for a translator. For those who aren't already well-versed in the history of anime, there is a list of basic works in the anime canon to familiarize yourself with as well as other anime-related resources on this page. Media Player Classic - This is the video playback program I use when translating from .mpeg/.avi files or from DVDs, and it is awesome. The reason for its extreme awesomeness is this: it's highly customizable, which is great for video translators who want to set up a shortcut that will, for example, jump back 5 seconds and allow them to listen to the same 5 seconds over again (and over, and over...). It's also a tiny little program, just one .exe file with nothing to install, and doesn't crash as often or try to give you as much fancy yet annoying "fringe" stuff as Windows Media Player or the like. Richard "Pocky" Kim and Shoko Oono turned me on to this program and I absolutely love it. Windows platforms. DVD43 - This is the program I use to let me view DVDs from any region on my computer. It works for Windows 2000 and Windows XP. So far it's never failed me, which is excellent because I want to retain the ability to view Region 1 discs but see everything else too. The only warning: the icon that sits in your system tray makes a kind of disturbing face when you feed it a DVD.... Back to the index page |