When you need Japanese language services, I sweat the details for you.
It’s been far too long since my last recommendations post, sorry!
Right Stuf is having another sale, this time for Memorial Day. Please keep in mind, only DVDs are on sale this time. So, if you want to purchase on Blu-ray, you may just want to add these to your wish list and wait for a Blu-ray sale.
And without further ado, here are some more recommendations from various genres: Continue Reading →
*Note: The views expressed in this essay are the author’s alone, and should not be taken to represent the views of any current or former employers.
When I read Uma Thurman’s stories of abuse and betrayal at the hands of the men who were supposed to be her collaborators, I couldn’t help but write about it. Something about the context of experiencing these terrible things while she was working on Kill Bill, one of the most violent cinematic environments possible (even if she and her stunt double were often the ones instigating the violence), struck a familiar chord with me.
I work in the entertainment industry, translating films and TV shows. I translate mostly TV, but I love film. Film is my greater love, and it’s where I wish I spent more of my time. But I’ll tell you something: Despite my profession, in my private life, that love died for a long time. I stopped watching films for years.
It wasn’t “despite” my profession. It was because of my profession.
I’ve never been sexually assaulted or put in extreme physical danger in the name of film, like Thurman and so very many of her colleagues. I don’t claim the #MeToo hashtag for myself, because it belongs to those who have experienced things I haven’t. But the juxtaposition of “my day job” with “horrific sexual violence” is familiar to me. I think it’s probably familiar to far more people than those outside the industry might imagine.
That’s why today, I want to talk about the entertainment industry. Not because it’s the only industry that is home to male sexual predators—it isn’t. Not because the suffering of entertainers matters more than other people’s suffering—it doesn’t. Not even because this is the worst of work environments for a language professional—that’s not true, either. (I can’t imagine what it’s like to be a court interpreter, hearing and relating the stories of crime victims.) But because it’s a work environment that’s not easy for many people to understand, and that’s something I can help with.
So, here are some thoughts on being a woman in the entertainment world.
As promised, here are the slides from my American Translators Association Annual Conference presentation. Thank you to all who attended! You were a great audience.
ATA 57 Presentation Slides (PDF)
Thank you to all the attendees who came to my “Leveling Up” presentation at IJET-27! You were a great audience, and I loved hearing your comments afterward. As promised, here is the PDF of my PowerPoint slides.
If you attended and you have suggestions for how I could improve the session, please feel free to comment or drop me a line.
If you weren’t able to make it to this weekend’s IJET in Sendai, you can catch the Level 2 version of this presentation at ATA57 in San Francisco. The specific examples will still be in Japanese, but I’ll be presenting in English, and about 80% of the content will apply to practitioners in all language pairs. The ATA version be 15 minutes shorter, but I promise I’ll try not to talk any faster. ^_~
As many of you know, last month, I gave a presentation at the 55th annual American Translators Association conference called “Pictures and Sound: Translating Television and Other Audiovisual Media.”
After the presentation, a few attendees asked me for copies of the slides. At the time I replied that I had no plans to release them, due to the fact that they contained video clips which I had copyright concerns about distributing.
However, I’ve now decided to release a PDF version of the slides, so that no video will be distributed but you can still see some of my notes, including parts of the presentation that I did not have time to get to. Just click here: ATA55prezi.
This is my work, so please do not distribute this PDF, but feel free to give anyone who might be interested the link to this blog post.
Thank you to all who attended the session, and especially to those who’ve reached out to me since then to share your thoughts about it! When I heard from two people that it was their favorite presentation of the conference, it made my year. :)
Tomorrow November 8th, I’ll be presenting my first-ever American Translators Association conference session. If you’ve ever wondered what translating audiovisual content is all about, come join me for session T-10: “Pictures and Sound: Translating Television and Other Audiovisual Media” from 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
So that attendees don’t have to give themselves hand cramps scribbling down new vocab or carry around yet another sheet of paper, I want to make a short list of the medium-specific terminology I use here. Please enjoy!
I look forward to meeting many of you. And if you translate from Japanese, Korean, or Chinese into any other language, don’t forget to bring your business cards!
Yoinking a great idea from the Fandom Post: Why not recommend some DVDs/Blu-rays that are on sale right now, so you can discover new things on the cheap?
Right Stuf, one of my favorite online retailers due to their friendly customer service, is having a 40% off sale until May 19th on DVDs and Blu-rays from FUNimation. (Full disclosure: that’s the company I work for. But there are great titles from other companies, too, so I’ll post those recs as I find out about sales. Also, please note: the content of this post represents my personal opinions, and in no way represents any statements or opinions of FUNimation’s.)
So, here are some 40%-off recommendations from various genres: Continue Reading →
©Taiyou Matsumoto, Shogakukan / PingPong The Animation Committee.
Licensed by FUNimation® Productions, Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
Well, I’m a little late posting it this time, but yep, I’m doing another simulcast this season: Ping Pong the Animation.
It’s based on the 1990s manga Ping Pong, which was popular enough to get a live-action film you may have seen (I’ve read the manga in Japanese, but I’m waiting to watch the movie’s English-language release until I’m done with the TV show, to avoid accidentally copying it). Like many sports anime, it’s a coming-of-age story about high school boys, but it’s got some intriguing differences as well.
First and foremost, the art style. It’s an unusual one: stylized rather than realistic, but not in the overly pretty way you so often see, and not in the cartoony way either. It’s simultaneously colorful and washed-out. And above all, it fits the original story more perfectly than I could have dreamed. The manga has a very sketch-like, rough quality that’s hard to maintain the feel of in animation. This really works, and at the same time its unreal components lend themselves well to the “hero” daydreams the main character has. It’s not a style I’ve liked much elsewhere, but I’m enjoying it a lot here.
The part that’s great except for how rough it is on me: it is really hard-core about its sport. Two episodes have aired so far, and both of them required me to learn a lot in a short time… which has been especially challenging in the case of table tennis, because to my surprise, there is evidently no Japanese<>English table tennis glossary in existence. ;_; So, you guessed it, I am having to learn the game in two languages and then try to figure out what corresponds to what, plus what’s unique in each language and doesn’t correspond to anything. After the relaxing Nobunagun, this is a far more difficult project. (If any of you are table tennis experts, let me know!)
Episodes 1 & 2 are up now at the FUNimation site, and Episode 1 is up on Hulu. If you’re a paid member of funimation.com, you can watch each week’s episode subtitled day and date with the Japanese broadcast. If not, you can watch the episodes for free starting one week after that. These one-week delayed episodes are free to watch both on FUNimation and Hulu’s sites.
Time for a couple more frequently asked questions! Two that I get often are about scripts for the anime shows/films that I translate.
When you do an anime do they send you a script or do they send you the episode?
The short answer to this one is “yes.” Or rather, yes, the licensor sends the video (hopefully final!), and if it’s available, they will send the script. However, scripts are not always available, so I have certainly translated episodes without scripts before.
I have heard of script-only translations, but I’ve never been asked to do one and I don’t believe in them.
Do you translate from the script or from the video?
Best practice is to translate from the video, using the script for reference. Wondering why? If you’ve ever read a screenplay for your favorite movie, you may have noticed that it didn’t quite match the movie you saw. What the audience sees is the final movie, and your job is to convey the final movie to the audience, not to convey a script that may or may not match.
Hope that makes sense!
© Masato Hisa/ EARTH STAR ENT./”Nobunagun Committee”
Licensed by FUNimation® Productions, Ltd. All Rights Reserved.
A new year, a new anime season, a new simulcast. Just started my new show, Nobunagun.
If you’re thinking, “That sounds like it’s probably about Oda Nobunaga’s soul being turned into a semiautomatic machine gun”… yep, that’s pretty much right! But wait, there’s more: it’s also about Oda Nobunaga teaming up with Gandhi and Jack the Ripper to save planet Earth. No joke.
I’m finding it restful after some recent intense projects—it’s nice to kick back and do a little zaniness for a change.
Episode 1 is up now at http://www.funimation.com/shows/nobunagun/anime, with launches on third-party vendor sites to follow. (Note: FUNimation’s version is different from Crunchyroll’s version, so you’ll get a version by a different translator on that site. If you watch via third-party vendors like Hulu, iTunes, etc., those will carry the FUNimation version.)