Winter 2020 Meeting Report
The winter meeting of the Ohio Honyaku Group was held on Saturday, January 18, 2020, at JASCO (Japan America Society of Central Ohio) headquarters in Dublin, Ohio. A total of 7 brave members attended despite inclement weather.
JASCO hosts a number of events for bringing Ohio’s Japanese and American communities together and also works closely with Japan-related businesses in central Ohio. Detailed event information is available from the JASCO website.
The meeting started with members catching up on news and personal events that have occurred over the long holiday. Of special note was a holiday greeting sent by Mutsuyo and Jim Unger to some of the long-time members of the group. This update on the health and activities of the Unger’s was an opportunity to share stories regarding the beginnings of the group, past practices and nostalgic episodes with newer members. We are all grateful for Mutsuyo-san’s past organization and efforts and enjoyed reminiscing about the 20 years that Honyaku members have been getting together.
The first presentation was based on a fascinating case study regarding the cooperation between Toyota and GM in developing a joint-venture (New United Motor Manufacturing Inc. – NUMMI) in California in the early 80’s. Using excerpts from a 2015 episode of the public radio program This American Life, the presentation explored the difficulties and accomplishments US workers had in learning the Toyota team and kaizen concepts. This included the revolutionary culture change that the Andon Cord model of quality control and improvements meant for GM workers that were traditionally warned never to stop production, no matter what. The progress that the NUMMI plant made, including achieving near perfect quality for Chevy Nova production was juxtaposed with the failures that the nearby Van Nuys plant made in implementing the same changes – due mostly to lack of cooperation from upper management and suppliers. There was additional discussion regarding the ongoing differences that still exist between US automobile design groups that focus on job specialization and Japanese design concepts that emphasize the team approach and having individuals perform all duties related to program design and implementation.
The following presentation concerned the difficulties in adequately translating numbers used in journalistic writings, especially E to J. Commonly used conventions in journalism to convey to the reader a sense of scale without being specific, while useful in the source language, can create dilemmas for the translator trying to be both true to the source text as well as factually accurate. Terms such as “hundreds of thousands”, “a few”, “quite a few”, “most”, “several”, “a number of” are sufficiently ambiguous and cannot always simply be translated using similar Japanese conventions of 数人、たくさんの、大半. There was an interesting discussion regarding the actual approximate value to be interpreted by these phrases and how they could be easily misunderstood depending on context.
The final presentation was a demonstration of a novel solution for the problem of providing simultaneous interpretation to multiple listeners during a meeting or presentation – even from remote locations. Traditional headsets have limited range and Skype offers no separate audio feed where listeners could hear the main presentation while also receiving an interpretation feed. Some services are prohibitively expensive charging as much as $400 for meetings with separate audio feeds. However the demonstration introduced two affordable solutions for smart phones: freeconferencecall.com and a low-cost alternative join.me. These services allow the interpreter to provide call-in access from any smartphone with mute controls on members so they can fully participate in a web meeting while listening to the interpretation from an ear jack on their own phone – both easy and convenient.
The Ohio Honyaku Group meets quarterly to discuss issues of importance to translators and interpreters of Japanese, and we welcome all current and future Japanese language professionals. The meetings are lightly structured and new topics for discussion tend to arise spontaneously as we chat. If you live in Ohio or a nearby state, or if you happen to be visiting the area when we are meeting, please join us!
The next meeting is scheduled for May 9th, 2020 at JASCO headquarters.
For more information, please visit our website at http://www.ohiohonyaku.com/.
Contact us at inquiries@ohiohonyaku.com.
Report prepared by A. L.
