{"id":116,"date":"2015-11-18T08:30:00","date_gmt":"2015-11-18T13:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/JLD\/wp\/2015\/11\/18\/ata-2015-two-roads-diverged-making-good-choices-in-japanese-into-english-translation\/"},"modified":"2015-11-18T08:30:00","modified_gmt":"2015-11-18T13:30:00","slug":"ata-2015-two-roads-diverged-making-good-choices-in-japanese-into-english-translation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/JLD\/2015\/11\/18\/ata-2015-two-roads-diverged-making-good-choices-in-japanese-into-english-translation\/","title":{"rendered":"ATA 2015: \u201cTwo Roads Diverged\u2026\u201d: Making Good Choices in Japanese-into-English Translation"},"content":{"rendered":"
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ATA 56th Annual Conference Session J2<\/span><\/div>\n
Thursday, Nov 05, 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Session Summary by<\/span><\/div>\n
Drew Fernando<\/span><\/i><\/div>\n

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As you probably already guessed by the allusion to the famous poem by Robert Frost, Session J-2 dealt with choosing between the possible options when translating from Japanese into English. It was presented by Professor James (Jim) Davis, director of the Technical Japanese Program in the University of Wisconsin-Madison\u2019s College of Engineering. <\/o:p><\/span><\/div>\n

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To begin with, Davis broke down translation into two aspects: comprehension and expression. Comprehension is your understanding of the source text, which would include things such as being aware of field-specific uses of words or special contexts. Your comprehension of a source text determines how you generate<\/i>choices. Expression determines how you choose<\/i>between the choices that you\u2019ve generated, in an effort to be accurate, consistent, or write something with a natural \u201cfeel.\u201d <\/o:p><\/span><\/div>\n

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Davis then walked through no less than fifteen examples of phrases which could be translated in a few different ways. The first example, taken from an article about Turkey trying to purchase air defense systems, presented two translation challenges in which one might choose between a few alternatives. <\/span><\/div>\n

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Let\u2019s look at the first example:<\/o:p><\/span><\/div>\n
(NATO<\/span>\u306f<\/span>)<\/span>\u3000\u653e\u3063\u3066\u304a\u3051\u3070<\/span>\u3001<\/span>NATO<\/span>\u306e\u9632\u7a7a\u30b7\u30b9\u30c6\u30e0\u306b\u95a2\u3059\u308b\u6a5f\u5bc6\u304c\u4e2d\u56fd\u306b\u6f0f\u308c\u304b\u306d\u306a\u3044\u3002<\/span><\/span><\/o:p><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

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Davis presented three alternatives for<\/span>\u653e\u3063\u3066\u304a\u3051\u3070<\/span>and three alternatives for the rest of the sentence. For <\/span>\u653e\u3063\u3066\u304a\u3051\u3070<\/span>t<\/span>hey are:<\/o:p><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

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\u201cIf the situation continues as it is,\u201d<\/o:p><\/span><\/i><\/div>\n

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\u201cIf steps are not taken,\u201d<\/o:p><\/span><\/i><\/div>\n

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\u201cIf NATO does nothing,\u201d<\/o:p><\/span><\/i><\/div>\n

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Davis\u2019 choice here was the third option. \u201cI prefer an active subject if I can identify one,\u201d he said. It should be noted, however, that the other two options were not labelled as explicitly \u2018wrong,\u2019 per se. <\/o:p><\/span><\/div>\n

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Moving on, three alternatives were presented for the second part of the sentence:<\/o:p><\/span><\/div>\n

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\u201cit is possible that secrets related to NATO\u2019s air defense systems will be leaked to China.\u201d<\/o:p><\/span><\/i><\/div>\n

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\u201csecrets related to NATO\u2019s air defense systems could flow to China.\u201d<\/o:p><\/span><\/i><\/div>\n

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\u201cChina could obtain secrets related to NATO\u2019s air defense systems.\u201d<\/span><\/i><\/o:p><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

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Davis chose the second option here, and walked through his reasoning. The first option is a literal translation, and it was \u201clong and clumsy.\u201d Davis indicated throughout the presentation that he tends to prefer writing shorter sentences in English if he can. The third option reads smoothly, but makes an omission because \u201ccould obtain\u201d is technically true, but doesn\u2019t convey what the source text says about information being leaked. The second option was the \u2018compromise\u2019 option, and Professor Davis\u2019 choice. <\/o:p><\/span><\/div>\n

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Aside from a couple exceptions, none of the proposed options throughout this presentation were said to be \u2018wrong\u2019 or \u2018bad.\u2019 Just as it\u2019s possible that both<\/i> of the roads in Robert Frost\u2019s poem could conceivably lead to the same destination, translation challenges almost always offer more than one acceptable \u2018solution.\u2019 But it would have been a cop-out to leave things at a wishy-washy conclusion like that, which is not what happened. Davis explained how to go about choosing options that will best translate the meaning of the source text. \u201cI\u2019m interested in translating meaning,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m not wedded to the words. \u201cWhen indicating his reasoning behind the choices that he thought were the best, he kept bringing it all back to comprehension and expression, and the various attributes they consist of. What are the connotations of this particular word? Will one choice early on limit the available choices later in the passage? Think about who or what you\u2019re translating\u2014what kind of language would a young hacker use when talking about himself? <\/o:p><\/span><\/div>\n

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In other words, there are a lot of factors to consider when deciding which \u2018road\u2019 to go down in your translation. But Davis finished by saying: \u201cChoice isn\u2019t a bad thing, it\u2019s managing choices wisely that matters.\u201d This presentation gave us a brief glimpse into how one of the best of the best in our field makes his own translation choices.<\/o:p><\/span><\/div>\n

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(P.S. I\u2019d like to thank all<\/u> the members of the JLD for being so welcoming and helpful during my first ATA conference!)<\/o:p><\/span><\/i><\/div>\n

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ATA 56th Annual Conference Session J2 Thursday, Nov 05, 2:00 PM – 3:00 PM Session Summary by Drew Fernando As you probably already guessed by the allusion to the famous poem by Robert Frost, Session J-2 dealt with choosing between the possible options when translating from Japanese into English. It was presented by Professor James […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[23,31,8,22,13],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/JLD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/JLD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/JLD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/JLD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/JLD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=116"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/JLD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/116\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/JLD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=116"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/JLD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=116"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ata-divisions.org\/JLD\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=116"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}