These articles I've been translating lately all include author bios at the end. You'd think translating the author bios would be easy money, but you'd be wrong. A lot of the information is abbreviated and, because many of these university departments and research institutes have an official English name, the official name has to be dug up and used. Also, these institutions reorganize and change their names frequently enough that I often have to find the official English name from two names ago.
Actually, the more of them I do, the easier it gets, so I can't complain.
Today, the authors of the article were a bunch of quitters. Usually the bios are mostly a list of degrees attained, but today's crop just about all had the word chuutai (中退), literally "drop out," somewhere in their bios. One guy dropped out of several degree programs, including a University of Tokyo program (hard to believe his parents didn't strangle him), but somehow managed to pick up a doctorate.
The first thing I do anymore is google the author's name spelled out in Roman letters, and maybe the name of their current employer, to see if they might happen to have a web page with their CV already in English. With one author, I struck gold: I found an English version of his bio which was almost identical to the one I was translating. Copy, paste, make a few changes!
With other authors I didn't get the gold, but I got something a little more fun. One had a personal page with a mixed Japanese and English CV, and pictures of himself barbecuing unidentifiable bits of food. He also had a link titled "Dog! Dog! Dog!" which led to a page of pictures of his fluffy dog, Princess. The pictures all had captions like "Hi! My name is Princess!"
After a while, the bios start to read like personal ads. "His research interests include compiler optimization, software engineering, and computer architecture." It seems like the next sentence should say something like "He likes soaking in the local hot springs, long walks on the beach, and bicycling …"
While I was making up a fake personal for one author, I discovered that he did, indeed, like cycling. I found an article in English about his wife and how she's visually impaired, but she participated in a bike tour around Shizuoka with her husband on a tandem tricycle. She said it was lovely, she got to smell the salty sea air and her husband described the scenery to her as they rode along. Aw!
Whenever I find fun author links, I want to paste the link into the translation so the copy editor can enjoy them too. I don't, because we're supposed to be all professional-like, but it's tempting.
465 words | October 19, 2005 09:25 PM | Lost in translation