Electronic dictionary recommendations

Electronic Japanese-English dictionaries are very popular among Japanese language learners, and the subject of which to buy is a perennial classic as there are constantly newer and better models coming out. Having been through this myself, I thought I’d weigh in.

The last electronic dictionary I had was a Seiko Japanese-English-Chinese one, probably an older version of this model. I tend to like Seikos in general, for no particularly good reason. Anything that has Kōjien (広辞苑, the standard Japanese-Japanese dictionary) and Kanjigen (漢字源, the standard kanji dictionary) is pretty much good enough in my book.

But when that Seiko inexplicably died after only 2 years and I was out ¥30,000 and left with no dictionary, I vowed never to buy another electronic dictionary again. I don’t need portability—pretty much the only time I need dictionaries these days is when I’m sitting at my computer. So I bought the PC version of Kōjien (also works natively on OS X, and on Linux via 3rd party software) and called it a day. Between Kōjien and the various other dictionaries available online, I find that I just don’t need a portable electronic dictionary.

Major dictionaries available online:

• Eijirō EJ/JE
• Daijirin and Daijisen JJ, Progressive EJ/JE, New Global EJ, New Century JE
• EDICT EJ/JE

Not online, but still very useful:

• The suite of JE/EJ, JJ, and thesauruses that come bundled with Mac OS X

I find that I don’t need much else these days, but if I need bigger and better dictionaries then I will likely invest in standalone PC or paper ones.

Ok, what if I needed portability? Here is what I would think about:

• Forget pen input entirely. It’s a waste of time for most kanji, especially if you don’t know the correct stroke orders. The fastest way to search for kanji is search by component name (部品読み検索). Of course this assumes that you know the names of kanji radicals. This assumption may not apply to you, but I recommend learning them if you’re serious about kanji proficiency.
• Kōjien and Kanjigen are the bare necessities for me. Some models substitute Daijirin (大辞林), which I find to be extremely limited in comparison.
• I don’t need color screens, 1-seg tuners, media readers, etc. If I was even remotely interested in that, I’d jump straight to a proper multimedia device like an iPod touch, an Eee PC, or something like that.
• “Bonus” dictionaries like English phrasebooks (とっさの英会話 or whatever), encyclopedias, etc. are also irrelevant to me.
• After considering the above items, the only other spec I really look at is the number of words in the English-Japanese and Japanese-English dictionaries. I don’t have a preference regarding Genius vs. Progressive vs. whatever, but some dictionaries are surprisingly limited.

So, those are my thoughts on electronic dictionaries. My needs are fairly different from the average language learner, but hopefully this will be useful to someone.

PS. I lied. I actually do use a dictionary on-the-go occasionally. It’s the crappy JJ one that came with my AU phone. But it often doesn’t have the words I’m looking for, so I wouldn’t recommend basing a cell phone purchase on this particular feature.

Romanizing Japanese addresses

There was a follup question to my previous post about Japanese place names. How do I write Japanese addresses in English?

The answer: I use full rōmaji, not dropping suffixes, and not translating anything. For example:

〒231-0017
神奈川県横浜市中区港町1丁目1番地

This would be

1-1 Minato-chō, Naka-ku
Yokohama-shi, Kanagawa-ken
231-0017

Some points on this:

• Translating certain elements into English, like “Kanagawa Prefecture,” “Naka Ward,” etc. is far too much trouble. “Naka Ward, City of Yokohama, Kanagawa Prefecture” has a lot of unnecessary verbiage.
  • Plus, this is Japan. Addresses should be written in Japanese (rōmaji is one of the officially recognized writing systems for Japanese, so no, I’m not advocating that the whole world learns kanji). If English addresses are allowed, then why not French, German, and so on? How many languages should a Japanese postal worker need to do his or her job?
• Some people remove suffixes like “-chō,” “-shi,” and “-ken,” but this creates consistency problems. There are lots of names that require the suffixes for disambiguation—the usual suspects (cities and prefectures that share names) and others (I live in Kanagawa-ku in Yokohama-shi in Kanagawa-ken). And sometimes the suffix is part of the name (like any 〜本町 -honchō), so you either have to neuter the place name or leave only some suffixes on.

So that’s the rationale. Now if you’d like some quick and to-the-point rules for romanizing addresses, here are the guidelines I wrote for Wikipedia:

Japanese addresses should be written “Western style”, where the order of specificity is ”specific” to ”general”, e.g.

{building number} {neighborhood}, {ku, city / town, district}, {prefecture}

For example, 愛媛県西宇和郡伊方町湊浦123番地 should be

123 Minatoura, Ikata-chō, Nishiuwa-gun, Ehime-ken

This is the opposite of Japanese style. Other things to note:

• Include, but do not translate, suffixes such as -ken, -shi, -chō, -gun.
• Drop 丁目 (chōme), 番地 (banchi), etc. and include only the numbers, hyphenated. E.g. 1丁目2番地3号室 should be ”1-2-3”.
  • Note that when the neighborhood’s name contains a number, the neighborhood should not be reduced to that number. E.g. 三番町 should be ”Sanban-chō”, not ”3”.
• Include 甲 (kō), 乙 (otsu), 耕地 (kōchi), etc. after the ”banchi” numbers.
• 大字 (ōaza) and 字 (aza) should be treated as prefixes to the ”neighborhood” part of the address.
• Linebreaks are not required between any address elements.

With all that said, however, I should note that the closest to an official recommendation would be whatever Japan Post uses. According to their English website, they seem to use the same system except they drop the suffixes on prefecture names.

Either way, I’m sure your mail will arrive.

On translating place names

This post has a lot more to do with my previous job as CIR in Ikata than it does with my current job translating video games. Nevertheless, I’ve thought a lot about this subject, and some people may find it useful, so here we go.

One of my pet peeves in Japan is the way Japanese place names (cities, towns, mountains, rivers, etc.) are written in English, particularly on street signs and maps. There are really two issues to deal with here: Municipality names, and tautological names. Let’s start with municipality names.

First, some background: In Japan, there are three official designations for municipalities, in ascending order of size:

• Village (村 mura)
• Town (町 machi or chō)
• City (市 shi)

My pet peeve is when “City” (or “Town” or “Village”) is appended to the city name. For instance, a street sign for 横浜市 (Yokohama-shi) will say “Yokohama City.” This is bad. Unfortunately even Google has recently started down this path: Update: At some point Google’s maps were updated to drop “city” suffixes.

Why is it bad? Well, the actual place name (地名 chimei) is “Yokohama.” Yes, the 市 means city, but in English we don’t append “city” to a place name unless “city” is actually part of the name, like Kansas City. For almost all Japanese cities, “city” is not, and should not, be part of the name. The only exception is cities which share the name of their surrounding prefecture, such as Shizuoka, Aomori, Chiba, etc. Like Kansas City, these should be “Shizuoka City,” etc., for disambiguation purposes.

And the same goes double for towns. I worked in “Ikata Town” for two years, and the phrase made me cringe every time. To the best of my knowledge, “town” is never a suffix in the English language, outside of a few special examples like “Chinatown.” Village doesn’t sound quite so bad, but it should also not be appended.

To reiterate, “city,” “town,” and “village” should not be appended to municipality names. If you’re not already convinced, here are some supporting points:

• The distinction between the Japanese legal definitions of “city,” “town,” and “village” is irrelevant to English speakers. Anyone who is aware of the difference can already read the Japanese.
• It just sounds bad. For instance, you never see “Minneapolis City,” even though the Japanese rendering (ミネアポリス市) has the same 市 suffix. A vote for “Yokohama City” is a vote for “Minneapolis City.”

Of course sometimes you need to refer to a municipal government by name, or need to distinguish between a town and a city of the same name. In that case, use “City of” as a prefix, as in City of Kansas City, City of Minneapolis, etc. “Town of” and “Village of,” as prefixes, also work nicely.

Second issue: Tautological names. A tautological place name is a name in which two or more parts of the name are synonymous. I don’t like them because they’re redundant. For example, I remember going to a waterfall in Shizuoka with an English name written as “Shiraitonotaki Falls.” The Japanese name is 白糸の滝 (Shiraito no taki), where taki means “waterfall.” So “Shiraitonotaki Falls” really means “Shiraito Falls Falls.” This is bad.

In general, I remove suffixes (eliminate redundancies) when translating names like these. However, sometimes the suffixes form an integral part of the name, such as the Mount Gassan (月山 Gassan) or Kamegaike Pond (亀ヶ池 Kamegaike). Some names become too short* when the suffix is removed, such as the Arakawa River (荒川 Arakawa). For these, I leave the name tautological in deference to aesthetic appeal.

*”Too short” is ill defined. As a barometer, I look at how many characters remain in the name after removing the suffix. If only one character remains, it’s too short.

Let’s switch gears and think about why bad translations, like “Yokohama City,” are made. I suspect it goes like this:

1. Japanese person with little or no English ability is nevertheless tasked with coming up with the English for something or other. He or she thinks, “市 = city, so ‘Yokohama City’ must be right!” No native English speaker is consulted.
2. The above creates a precedent, and the phrase “Yokohama City” spreads like a plague onto all sorts of pamphlets, signs, materials, etc., often as part of a logo or easily-overlooked fine print. Since the pamphlet, sign, etc. is written mostly in Japanese, no native English speaker is consulted.
3. By the time a native English speaker (perhaps a JET) arrives on the scene, a huge amount of precedent already exists in the form of Japanese materials, or perhaps English materials of overall shoddy quality. He or she changes “Yokohama City” to “City of Yokohama” or just “Yokohama,” and gets a complaint from someone higher up the food chain. “Well, I guess ‘Yokohama City’ isn’t so bad,” he or she sighs, taking solace in the fact that at least the pamphlet is now comprehensible.

I urge JETs and anyone else in a position to determine official English names: Please consider my arguments above and create an English manual of style for your office if you don’t already have one. Take a look at the one I made for Ikata if you’d like some ideas. Even if you disagree with me, a manual of style is essential for keeping translations consistent (even if they’re consistently bad).

A lukewarm reception

I did some freelance translation into Japanese, the exact thing a native English speaker usually shouldn’t do, for a friend of mine’s video game. Following some linkbacks to my blog, I found the one and only piece of feedback I’ve received from that job so far:

硫黄島が舞台ということで、相手になるのは日本軍。もちろん敵は日本語を話す。日本語音声の翻訳は[amake.us]なるプロジェクトが努め、イシカワタクミさんという方が声を担当しているお陰か、話している言葉はまとも。イシカワタクミさんの声に覇気があまり感じられないが、今までの洋ゲーに登場した日本語に比べればマシな方だろう。
「左舷に米軍を発見！」
「やっつけろぉー！」
「助けてくれぇー！」
「やつらぶっ倒した！」

English (my translation):

Since it’s set on Iwojima, you’re pit against the Japanese Army. Of course they speak Japanese. Perhaps since the Japanese voice translation was done by the [amake.us] project and a guy named Takumi Ishikawa provided the voice acting, the vocals are passable. Ishikawa’s voice doesn’t have much impact, but it’s decent Japanese when compared to other Western games up to this point.
“Americans on the port side!”
“Get ‘em!”
“Help!”
“We got ‘em good!”

That’s good, I suppose. Except none of the lines I translated involved “port” or the exact phrasing of “Get ‘em!” that the blogger uses. I’m the only one listed in the credits as a translator, so either the voice actor did some on-the-fly rewriting, or the blogger is misremembering what he heard in the game, or there’s a ghost-translator involved.

Spooky.

Overall the blogger pans the game for being way too short and boring, though the visual effects were nice.

Quitting while you’re ahead

My father claims that he’d rather die spectacularly at 60 than deteriorate slowly into even older age. With that deadline looming not so far away now, I’m interested to see if he puts his money where his mouth is.

I bring this up because I was reading a classical Japanese text from the 1330s called 徒然草 (officially “Essays in Idleness” in English according to Wikipedia) today, and chapter 7 deals specifically with this issue.

あだし野の露消ゆる時なく、鳥部山の煙立ち去らでのみ住み果つる習ひならば、いかにもののあはれもなからん。世は定めなきこそいみじけれ。

命あるものを見るに、人ばかり久しきはなし。かげろふの夕べを待ち、夏の蝉の春秋を知らぬもあるぞかし。つくづくと一年を暮すほどだにも、こよなうのどけしや。飽かず、惜しと思はば、千年を過すとも、一夜の夢の心地こそせめ。住み果てぬ世にみにくき姿を待ち得て、何かはせん。命長ければ辱多し。長くとも、四十に足らぬほどにて死なんこそ、めやすかるべけれ。

そのほど過ぎぬれば、かたちを恥づる心もなく、人に出ヰで交らはん事を思ひ、夕べの陽に子孫を愛して、さかゆく末を見んまでの命をあらまし、ひたすら世を貪る心のみ深く、もののあはれも知らずなりゆくなん、あさましき。

My translation, in which I take extreme liberties:

If people didn’t disappear like the morning dew, instead just hanging around in this life like so much LA smog, how tacky that would be. Life’s a bitch, then you die; and that’s the way we likes it.

Of all the creepy crawlies in the world, none seem to live as long as humans do. The mayfly barely gets to see the sun set; a cicada born in summer will bite it before ever seeing spring or fall. Given that, having the luxury of dicking around Europe to “find yourself” for a year is the height of opulence. If you’re not satisfied with your lot, even living 1,000 years would feel about as long as a dream to you. Do you really want to get all old and wrinkly? Being old sucks. At the very oldest, plan to die before 40.

If you break 40, you’ll lose all sense of shame in your appearance, and somehow you’ll think it appropriate to put on airs of being “cool” and “with it” to the younger generation. In your final days you’ll still want to live on, to see how your ungrateful children and grandchildren turn out. Your greed for life in this world will consume you, and you’ll wind up a pathetic old coot with no understanding of propriety or pathos.

一味違った現代語訳もある。

While we’re talking classical literature and whatnot, here’s something I rediscovered recently: The shortest letter in Japanese history.

一筆啓上　火の用心　お仙泣かすな　馬肥やせ

Translation:

Greetings. Be careful of fire. Don’t make Osen (our son) cry. Feed the horses.

This came up in one of my Japanese classes at UW, and for some reason it recently came to mind, but I could only remember the last line. Wikipedia to the rescue!

This letter was written by Shigetsugu Honda in 1575. He sent it to his wife from the front lines of the Battle of Nagashino.

Yes, this kind of thing is horribly interesting to me. Yes, I am a nerd.

I loves me some Murakami

I wouldn’t call myself a voracious reader. Maybe I was back in the 3rd grade when I read one Hardy Boys mystery a week. Until recently I was lucky to get through one non-school book a year.

Having little to do between graduation and leaving for JET has afforded me an opportunity to catch up on my non-school, uneducational reading list. Top priority on that list has been Haruki Murakami, famed Japanese novelist and essayist.

I’ve read a good number of his books, all in Japanese, but it was returning to one that I had already read but forgotten most of, 羊をめぐる冒険 (“A Wild Sheep Chase”), that reminded me why I like him so much. Here are some excerpts that I consider to be primely “Murakami-esque” (all translated by me):

[The head waiter] tilted the wine label toward me, grinning as if he were showing me a picture of his only son. I nodded, and with a pleasant sound he popped the cork and poured the wine into my glass little by little. It tasted like my food budget, condensed into liquid form.

Whether you perceive the hole of a donut as nothingness or as an existence in itself is purely a question of metaphysics; it has no effect whatsoever on the donut’s taste.

I slowly drank my beer, slowly gazed out into the night, slowly clipped my fingernails into the ashtray, again gazed out into the night, then polished my nails with the nail file. In this way, the night drew on. When it comes to killing time in a big city, I’m gradually approaching the realm of “veteran.”

The original Japanese is below, for those who might be interested.

僕は今では別に本を熱心に読むようなやつじゃない。大昔、たとえば小学生のころ、「Hardy Boys」という子ども向けの刑事もののシリーズを週に一冊ぐらい読んでいた。でも高校に上がってからは宿題やら何やらで忙しくて、だいぶ読まなくなった。自分の好みで読んだ本なら、年に一冊程度のものだろう。

しかし、この間卒業して、８月までとんでもなく暇なので、ずっと読みたかったものをやっと読んでいる。たとえば村上龍の『コインロッカーベイビーズ　上』を終えて、ついに村上春樹の『海辺のカフカ　下』を読んだ。なぜか僕が読むやつはたいてい上下に分かれている。なんでだろう。アメリカの小説はそういうのはあまりないと思う。

上下に分かれているというのはある場合には問題になったりする。ミネアポリスには紀伊国屋やミツワみたいなショッピングセンターはないから、日本の小説を手に入れる方法といえば大体この３つしかない。ひとつは Amazon.co.jp から寄せる。これは高い。もうひとつは知り合いからもらう。読み物に関して気が合う友だちがいればこれがベストだが、そうでないかぎり話は難しくなってくる。最後には、 Uptown の古本屋に行って、たまたま日本語の本が置いてあるのを祈ってみる。実は、売っているところはある— Magers & Quinn 。でもその品揃いは非常に適当で、ここで「上下問題」が発生する — なぜか上巻だけが置いてあるという状況は意外と多い。

道理で村上春樹の『羊をめぐる冒険　下』を最近手に入れたばかりなのに、上巻を読んだのはもう何年も前のことである。下巻を読みはじめて、何がなんだかさっぱりわからなかった。それじゃあ、上巻をもう一度読まないと、続きを読む意味がない。僕は普通は本を読んでしまえばもう二度と読まない主義だけれど、（だって２回も読む暇があれば、新しいものを読んだ方がいいんじゃない？）上巻をまた読み返して、うれしいことに村上春樹のすばらしさを再確認できた。特に「村上らしい」ところをいくつか紹介しよう。

［ヘッド・ウェイター］は一人息子の写真でも見せるようににっこりと微笑みながらワインのラベルを僕に向け、僕が肯くと感じの良い小さな音を立てて栓を抜き、グラスにひとくちずつ注いでくれた。凝縮された食費の味がした。

ドーナツの穴を空白として捉えるか、あるいは存在として捉えるかはあくまで形而上的な問題であって、それでドーナツの味が少しなりとも変るわけではないのだ。

ゆっくりビールを飲み、ゆっくり夜景を眺め、灰皿の上でゆっくりと爪を切り、もう一度夜景を眺め、爪にやすりをかけた。そのようにして夜は更けていった。僕は都会における時間のつぶし方にかけてはベテランの域に達しつつある。

これらの自作英訳は上の方にあるので、興味のある方はどうぞ。