Summer 2018 Meeting Report
Ohio Honyaku held our summer meeting at the Japan America Society of Central Ohio (JASCO) on July 21, 2018 with 12 regular members and 2 guests. Over lunch we held a short business meeting and discussed the following items:
(1) Whether we will vary our meeting format (currently 5-minute presentations followed by discussion) by occasionally having longer presentation or workshop, or even a guest speaker. No consensus was reached since some regular members could not attend, so the discussion is ongoing. We also noted that longer programs should probably have a time limit to ease the burden on the presenter and allow adequate time for discussion. We plan to have a workshop on patents and patent translation at our fall meeting.
(2) Whether we should post handouts from meeting presentations on our website. We discussed maintaining anonymity of presenters, allowing a presenter to opt out of posting because of NDA’s with customers, etc., making the handouts available in a read-only format, and requiring a member log in to gain access. Since our webmaster is currently in Japan, the discussion will be continued in the future.
(3) The current trend toward a gig economy, i.e., employers hiring part-time, temporary, or freelance workers rather than full-time workers. The advantages to companies are greater flexibility in responding to changes in their business situation and cost savings through not having to offer financial benefits and health insurance coverage that are enjoyed by full-time employees.
We also talked about new words and shortened forms in colloquial Japanese, and reminisced about publications such as現代用語の基礎知識,知恵蔵, andイミダスas written sources to keep people informed of the latest trends. One of our members who translates current news items into Japanese mentioned that he must always be aware of current acceptable usage. For example, for the English term “mobile phone,” is the preferred Japanese translation in a news article 携帯電話,モービルホーン,モービル,スマートフォンorスマート?
Our 5-minute presentations covered the following topics:
(1) An easy and inexpensive way to switch from a conventional hard drive to a solid-state hard drive in a laptop computer, and the advantages of each type of drive.
(2) Output from J>E Google Translate, and despite the advances of neural network MT, the output may be comprehensible, but still does not approach human output for documents requiring publication quality translations. The trend, however, seems to be that job opportunities will shrink for J>E translators below the level of those who possess expert knowledge and high-level writing skills in specialized fields.
(3) In light of the recent Trump-Putin summit in Helsinki, what obligation does an interpreter have to maintain confidentiality and to whom? This is especially important for in-house interpreters who must deal with multiple supervisors who sometimes disagree or request specific information about what was said in a meeting. It can also affect medical interpreters because of cultural differences. For example, when an American doctor needs to inform a Japanese patient ofa terminal medical condition, it may put the interpreter in an awkward position. The doctor may be legally obligated to convey that information, but the interpreter may be an employee of a third-party provider with guidelines stating that the patient’s immediate family should be informed first.
(4) A show-and-tell of popular Japanese Christmas cards with the “mini-santa” theme.
(5) A short presentation on using Adobe Software’s subscription service to convert image PDF files to formatted MS Word files. The use of Abbyy FineReader software was also discussed as an alternative for handling confidential documents on a desktop computer.
(6) A side-by-side comparison of the same foreign loanwords in Japanese and Korean with a discussion of different nuances between Japanese and Korean for the same source-language word, and variations between North and South Korean usage. Examples includedスルフ,アルバイト,ホチキッス,パン,ネット, andアイスクリーム. The presenter also noted that economic power and other factors related to the source-word country can affect which loan words are adopted.
(7) An observation that Japanese corporate structure is becoming more multinational than in the past as highly skilled and well-educated employees from outside Japan have started to move up the corporate ladder into management positions. This was followed by a short discussion on labor shortage in Japan and speculation on how the traditional monolithic structure of Japanese corporations may be changing in the future.
Our next meeting is scheduled for Saturday, October 27, at JASCO headquarters in Dublin, OH.We welcome all persons with professional J<>E interests to our meetings as visitors and new members. For further information, visit our website and contact us at www.ohiohonyaku.com.
Prepared by J.S.
