In yesterday’s mail, the Japanese translation of Network Flow Analysis:
I have two copies for Japanese-reading reviewers. I’d also like to add a link to the publisher’s page for the book, but the ASCII Web site defeated me. If you know enough Japanese to figure it out, I’d appreciate it.
Translations of my books fascinate me. That’s my name on the cover, but I don’t understand the alphabet, let alone the sentences. But recognizable English words are scattered throughout the text, including neologisms I created. (Doesn’t “neologism” sound more impressive than “words Lucas made up”?) A native English speaker would have no trouble with those neologisms, but I can’t imagine what a Japanese reader would make of them.
And there’s footnotes. The narrator of NFA uses the footnotes to suggest blackmail. I wonder how well that translates?
I live in Japan currently and get along OK in Japanish. If you are curious about something, I’d be pleased to let you know what I can find out.
What website was it?
On the note of English turning up in technical books… it is actually a pretty big problem. While new words with strong Saxon or even Latin influence can conjure up meaningful images in the minds of native English speakers who have never heard a specific term (“worked it into something”, leatherworking, network…), they mean less than nothing to native Japanese speakers. Its worse here than in Europe and South America because almost nobody in a professional field speaks any English at all. Japanese administrators tend to just memorize badly hacked up English and assign their own, often weird, internal meanings and do their best to carry on. When rendered in Japanese sound-spellings via Katakana, whether on the page or in the mind, most English terms sound radically different, so you might be surprised to discover what some readers may think of directly transliterated terms you made up in English (and how they say them — come to think of it, you wouldn’t believe how they pronounce “McDonald’s”).
It turns out that Japanese very often do have excellent native vacabulary for nearly anything, including modern computing and technical terms — but just as often it is in the interest of marketers to disguise the real meaning of their product pitches by abuse of katakanized English, presenting as though they were selling pure magic and not technology. This has a tendency to get in the way of the general public learning anything more than hacked up transliterated terms.
For instance, if I explain to a client in native Japanese terms how they were up and oversold hundreds of thousands of yen in bogus IT gadgets and totally useless software for the office they get the point immediately and wonder why they have been taken for a ride for so long (like being force fed “PDF creators”, “screenshot software”, and especially bogus security software cloaked in the impenetrable mysteries of important sounding transliterated English). If, on the other hand, I just revert to katakanized English for anything I’m afraid they might have a genuine understanding of, I can invent entire worlds of false need. Actually, my market position is based on being the one honest computing provider — and partly on being obviously white enough to have a complete understanding of whatever the current dialogue in English IT Land is today. Of course, that is also related to my chief business problem: It is nearly impossible to locate investment capital because I’m foreign, so the going is slow!
Anyway, congratulations on diversifying so far!
Thanks! The publisher is “ASCII books.” Unfortunately, the actual books are now in storage as part of my move. I’d like to have a link to the actual publisher’s Web page for the book.