Ideas for Blog Posts

Please share your ideas if you have more or different ones.

Templates – Case Reports, Government Forms (marriage, koseki), Patents, etc. I would be happy to share mine (marriage registration forms, case report outlines). I just spent a long time scouring the internet for the marriage registration form. It seems like reinventing the wheel to translate them over and over, but I don’t know how people feel about that (proprietary?). I was surprised that it wasn’t online, or maybe I just couldn’t find it. 

Funny stuff – translation mistakes/speaking mistakes. I have a few. It would be fun to compile them. And it would provide some comic relief.

How to translate your personal website into Japanese, or from Japanese into English. This is an amorphous idea, and maybe not relevant to the blog, but I want to do it. I thought it would be nice to “partner” with a Japanese native to do reciprocal translations.

Asking people who give talks at conferences/local ATA gatherings to provide summaries for the blog (including relevant links, documents, if possible).

Article on new language learning or foreign language apps/new technology. 

Helpful little translating tools. Like CodeZapper. Or how to zap codes (I hate them!).

A comparison of CAT tools and the best picks for Japanese. I use Swordfish. Only because someone told me it was the best, and I believed him. So it would be nice if someone out there with real knowledge and experience of using multiple CAT tools could share his/her opinions.

Links to watching Japanese TV shows online. For some reason, this is always difficult for Japanese (must be copyright related).

Interview: I can try to interview my friend and colleague (interpreter/translator) Christopher Field (https://www.christopherfield.com/). He regularly interprets for government agencies (and high-ranking people, such as Chuck Hagel, most recently), and also does legal deposition interpreting. I would need help in formulating questions, though, because I’m not an interpreter. 

Article: Chris Field also did a presentation at the ATA in Boston in 2011 about Commodore Perry’s interpreters.  It was quite interesting, and might make good blog content. I could ask him to write something up about that.

I also know Nadine Edwards, who is a J-E translator and will be the administrator for the JLD. We can try to enlist her in blog writing, too, since she will be most up-to-date on JLD administrative details.

An article about Japanese language jobs for the federal government. I don’t have one, but I live in the DC area, and so it’s a relevant topic here.

Article about current language trends in Japan (popular culture).

Asking a seasoned medical, legal, patent, technical translator to provide his/her top 10 most used websites in his/her work.

Reviews of book translations. I did one review of a novel for the ALTA last year. (Can’t remember the Japanese title, but the English title was A Room Where the Star-Spangled Banner Cannot Be Heard).I didn’t review the book itself so much as the translation, by comparing passages in Japanese and English, and talking about the translator’s stylistic and linguistic choices, how they worked and to what effect, etc. I think it was a helpful exercise for thinking about the nuances of translation, but in a concrete way.

Amy Franks