Summer 2024 Meeting Report
The summer meeting of the Ohio Honyaku Group was held on Saturday, August 24, 2024 in a beautiful conference room at the Hilliard Branch of the Columbus Metropolitan Library. The room was equipped with a projector and screen, allowing participants to display content from their laptops. A total of five members attended.
Being our first meeting since January 2020, the meeting started with members catching up on their current situations, including work. Several were now retired or working less. However, one actively working member gave his view of the current market based on his work situation, which seemed to indicate a downturn in volume overall. Also, AI/MT was having a dramatic impact on the market through reduced rates for so-called “post-editing jobs,” which can take nearly as long as typical translation work. Furthermore, certain types of translation were no longer being requested, although it was noted that there was still noticeable demand for website and financial/IR translations.
Members also brainstormed about potential job career change destinations for a translator in his/her prime. Some of these included technical writer (although this would be affected similarly by AI) and in-person jobs such as teaching in one’s field of expertise or working in a local Japanese supplier to Japanese automakers (Honda, Toyota) operating here in the Midwest.
From there, members talked about the future of the Group and how best to recruit new members. There was no disagreement that we need to widen our focus beyond just translation, but the issue is by how much. We agreed that we must include local people who work in Japanese companies and deal with Japan in their work, but we were uncertain how much we should embrace the all-encompassing “Japanese culture.” For example, while there is currently intense interest in anime and manga, and some translators learned from manga and even work in these fields, we want to avoid such niche fields becoming too much of our Group’s emphasis, and instead, focus on bridging communication gaps between the two cultures, particularly in work environments. It was also pointed out that the room itself can probably only accommodate 12-15 people comfortably. If we were to put our Group’s focus in words, it would be something like “Japanese-English multicultural communication.”
In the end, to get the word out, we decided to publish our meeting minutes in several public Japanese translator forums, which is a long-established practice of our Group, and work to gradually expand our member base through these forums, our website (ohiohonyaku.com), and invitations from current members to ensure that we gain a membership that shares our vision and values. We also had a few key members who could not attend this meeting, so we will wait for the next meeting to get their input as well. Beyond that, no decision was made on our future direction.
The discussion was followed by presentations from members. The first was the “Translation of a Japanese Battle Flag from Iwo Jima” by John S. This was a pro-bono project that he worked on for a friend. In the process of his research on this 寄せ書き日の丸 (“Good Luck Flag”), he was reminded of the terribleness of war and how the consequences of war resonate for generations.
The second presentation, by Cliff B., was on a similar vein and covered letters written shortly after WWII by former residents of Japanese-American internment camps. He explained how the writer had only learned Japanese up to the 2nd or 3rd grade level, and so the letters were written almost exclusively in katakana with a spattering of kanji. They also used a dialect, which made the translation even more challenging. The presenter cited the usefulness of the book Facing the Mountain by Daniel James Brown and the website https://densho.org/ as invaluable resources for his research.
Regrettably, we did not have time for a third presentation by Jay K., which would have covered his ongoing journey to consolidate, extend, and integrate his knowledge of kanji through study using several apps and other reference works, both electronic and paper. The presentation has been slated for a future meeting.
Finally, we held a small book exchange and talked about making such exchanges a regular part of our meetings. After the exchange, there were some technical dictionaries left over. The library accepted those as a donation to either be added to the collection or sold at a book sale to raise revenue.
The Ohio Honyaku Group meets quarterly to discuss issues of importance to people working with Japanese companies and the Japanese language, 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 tentatively scheduled for November/December 2024 at the Columbus Library’s Hilliard Branch.
For more information, please visit our website at http://www.ohiohonyaku.com/.
Contact us at inquiries@ohiohonyaku.com.
Report prepared by C. K., Revised by J. K.
