Tag Archives: Translation

Warm Hospitality

When people ask me how I got interested in Japanese, I usually tell them it was my love for Japanese literature, sparked in my senior year of high school. This isn’t a lie; it was after discovering author Haruki Murakami that I decided to dedicate myself to the language in order to close the gap between the English translations I was reading and the original texts that felt so unreachable.

The fact of the matter, though, is that my interest in Japanese was sparked much earlier. My older sister liked manga growing up, so I also came to like it through the osmosis of siblinghood. This childhood interest exploded into an embarrassing anime phase in middle school, and my insistence on watching shows in the original Japanese allowed me to pick up on a few words from the subtitles. I remember bragging to a friend how, while watching a show, I’d learned the Japanese word for “liar”: usoda. With only my ears and the subtitles to guide me, I didn’t realize that uso was the word for “lie,” not “liar,” and da was a conjugation of the verb desu, “to be.” Still, despite my fragmented understanding, the sound of the language stuck with me—and when I had a chance to study a new language, those butchered phrases that lingered on my tongue pushed me back to Japanese.

It’s an embarrassing origin story, I’m aware—and it’s common. I know now that the popularity of anime and manga in the United States is no accident; the Japanese government has worked hard to cultivate their unique pop culture into a consumable international product. From my middle school’s obsession with Death Note to the tremendous impact that films like Akira and Ghost in the Shell have left on American sci-fi, it’s impossible to quantify the pop culture impact of the U.S.-Japan alliance.

That’s what it’s called now: an alliance. The use of the word here feels a bit euphemistic, carrying the same weight as an offer you can’t refuse. American history books tell the story hurriedly, like someone trying to guide their houseguest past the room they forgot to clean: the bombs fell, the Japanese gave up their military, and then America and Japan became friends. It’s a very American story: a “bad guy” country being reformed by our intervention. If a little bit of occupation was necessary for that, and if that occupation still continues today at the expense of Japan’s most vulnerable populations, well, Japan got rid of their military (completely of their own volition, of course), so all of our military bases are just keeping them safe. It’s only fair they stay on our side, right? I’m no expert at foreign policy, but I do have to wonder: what does the word “alliance” mean when your supposed ally has a gun to your head?

You might be wondering what this has to do with me. The answer is: a lot more than I’d like, unfortunately. Because when you seize control of a sovereign nation, chances are you’re going to need translators. And the question of who were becoming translators in those critical postwar years has significant ramifications for the legacy of Japanese studies in the United States.

Once I declared my Japanese major in college and began to take more classes, I noticed a pattern amongst the translators lauded as “Japanese studies pioneers.” For one, they tended to be men. Second, they were almost always white. Third, many of them were born in the 1910s or ’20s. Japanese-Americans were commonly recruited as translators during the war, but when it came to the postwar period, white American men were the ones responsible for selling Japan to the American public. It went about as well as you’d expect. I will never forget the translation I read in one of my literature classes, where one of these pioneers translated “Chinese noodles” as “spaghetti.” He knew it was wrong, but accuracy was sacrificed for the goal of making Japan palatable to a country that had split its time between depicting Japanese people as rats in propaganda posters and sending Japanese-American families to internment camps. It was a balancing act between humanizing Japanese people and grooming them for their role in America as the fascinating but safe other. It’s how we’ve gotten where we are now: Americans speaking confidently on Japan’s conformity and racial homogeneity, spinning wild tales about oxygen bars and panties in vending machines, and praising orientalist works like Memoirs of a Geisha that have come to supersede even inaccurately translated Japanese texts as prime examples of what Japan is.

The bombing and occupation of Japan fundamentally shaped modern Japanese studies in the United States. It feels obvious now, but when I first committed to learning Japanese in 2016, I never would have made the connection. I would not have understood how this idealized portrayal of Japan had, in some ways, led me to the language. If I was incapable of having that epiphany myself, how can I know that I wasn’t influenced by the exoticizing gaze that has led so many white Americans to the language, either via pop culture or by the portrayals of geisha and samurai in American works deemed classics? It is difficult to reconcile with the immense joy I’ve obtained through learning the language—and while I certainly try to be more conscientious now, I’ve accepted that I will always be unlearning these perceptions.

That being said, there’s a fine line between self-awareness and self-flagellation—and the latter, when discussing dynamics of power and marginalization, runs a high risk of turning conceited. As I’ve deepened my studies and connected with more people who have a relationship to Japanese, a major guiding light I’ve found is the realization that learning a language is a communal experience. From my classmates to my professors to the older couple who took care of me during my semester in Kyoto, I can say with confidence that the relations between Japanese and English speakers do not have to be unequal, and that to assume so runs the risk of taking agency from the former. To paint myself as an intruder in the language is not only pessimistic, it erases the plethora of Japanese and Japanese-American people invested in Japanese-English translation for reasons that have nothing to do with me. So rather than condemn myself as an infiltrator, I prefer to think of myself as a guest; there is a place for me here, as long as I am willing to accept the limits of that place’s hospitality.

And what is a guest’s role? That’s something I’m still trying to figure out, and I don’t think that it’s a static role. But I think that, in general, it follows the code of any guest etiquette: Follow the house rules. Don’t go into private rooms without permission. Acknowledge that not every resident will have the same boundaries. Apologize for plates accidentally dropped, or carpets accidentally dirtied. And most of all, be thankful for the welcome.

Sage Theune is a junior at Smith College. They study English literature and Japanese.

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“Is Spanish or Arabic an easier language to learn?”

As a linguist, I find this question frustrating, and as a student of both languages, I hear it far too often and can never answer it. English is my first language and the language spoken in my home, but I have been exposed to Spanish for nearly as long. I have been learning Spanish from the moment my grandparents cooed to me in their native language a few hours after I was born. Filled with constant ups and downs from changes in linguistic exposure and practice, my proficiency in Spanish is a rollercoaster I’ve been building for 21 years, from my grandparents to the Spanish lessons I received in school to my visit to Spain two years ago. In comparison, my acquisition of Arabic is a mountain I’ve only just begun to climb. I picked up a bit of spoken dialect while living in Morocco in 2018, and I began to formally learn the language a few months later during college. My experiences learning these languages could not be more different; my motivations towards learning as well as the barriers to acquisition are different. My future in each is different. I’ve learned from studies in linguistic theory that assigning arbitrary labels like ‘easy’ or ‘hard’ to any language undermines its complexity and its speakers, but I’ve learned from my experience that every acquisition is a journey; it is easy and hard and every adjective in between.

While many of my relatives are bilingual, having a monolingual, English-speaking mother means I’ve nearly always been able to see language barriers. Even families that speak the same language can have problems with miscommunication, but when family members are trying to convey important messages across language, what gets “lost in translation” becomes even more important. From the time I was a baby, both my immediate and extended family have had miscommunication issues with things like arranging childcare, communicating health information, and giving instructions. Because of these language barriers, I’ve always felt a pressure from my mother to learn Spanish so that I could help my father fill the gap between her and her Spanish-speaking in-laws. However, once I became a bit older, that pressure turned into a desire to form that bridge between languages, to communicate with my grandparents more effectively and deeply, to help the stressed traveler at Penn Station who needs directions, and to converse with hundreds of millions of people across language and culture.

While many similar desires fueled my study of Arabic, I never felt that same need to learn the language; it was just something that I wanted to do. At first, my interest in Arabic revolved around an interest in Middle Eastern politics. While my interests have shifted over the past few years, after living in Morocco for a few months and planning to live in the Arab world for many, many more, I remain deeply invested in the culture. Overall, the reason I continue to study Arabic is because I enjoy it, something that is more difficult for me to say about my study of Spanish. While my need to continue learning Spanish comes from my environment and the people around me, my need to learn more and more Arabic comes from within me: it’s a thirst that I can’t satiate.

As my interests in each language differ, so do the barriers to learning them. Acquiring a new language is always challenging, but I’ve had many more resources and opportunities to help me learn Spanish than Arabic. I have received formal Spanish lessons through the public school system since I was six years old, whereas my first year of college was the first time I was able to enroll in an Arabic course. There are also many more websites, apps, and media designed for Spanish language learning than the Arabic equivalent. I also have more exposure to the Spanish language in my day-to-day life: beyond my relatives, growing up in Northern New Jersey, I’ve met countless Spanish speakers, but only a handful of Arabic speakers. Before going abroad or starting college, I had very little exposure to Arabic conversation, and even since beginning college, I have had hardly any experience conversing for anything more than educational purposes. In contrast to my time spent in Spain, while I was in Morocco, I had no formal training in Arabic, and while I picked up some conversational Arabic, I was not able to practice any language that I’d actually studied. I hope to study abroad in an Arabic-speaking country, but, as of right now, I have much more real-life experience using Spanish than Arabic.

Nonetheless, one of the biggest barriers to my Spanish learning is barely applicable to my Arabic learning: my insecurity. While not being able to recall something in Arabic can be frustrating, when I am practicing Spanish, I find myself disappointed in how little I truly know how to express, despite learning the language for so many years. I find myself reluctant to practice at all, knowing how difficult it will be and feeling like I don’t actually know Spanish at all. While my Arabic skills are lightyears away from flawless, I don’t expect myself to know things the way that I do with Spanish, regardless of how unrealistic those expectations may be. A conversation in Spanish often leaves me frustrated and ashamed of how little I was able to express, whereas a conversation in Arabic leaves me excited over how much my conversational skills have improved from a year or two ago.

This past semester, when confronted with an overbooked schedule, I made an important decision: to drop my Spanish class. Before then, I’d been struggling to figure out how both Spanish and Arabic fit into the academic plan for the rest of my undergraduate education. However, I realized that my interest in Spanish was much more recreational: I wanted to chat with my grandparents and listen to Latin American alt rock music and watch La casa de papel with the captions off. While my interest in Arabic is also recreational, it’s academic as well. It’s the language I plan to translate from and, because of the many differences from English, it’s the language I enjoy analyzing syntactically and semantically in my linguistics classes.

Overall, I am in very different places with each of my language acquisitions. While I could attempt to choose which language was easier for me to learn, the truth is that my linguistic journeys in both languages will never be the same. My Spanish skills feel like an innate ability that I have been gradually building since birth, a roller coaster that has been under construction for over two decades. While it is fully operational and well trafficked, there’s still plenty of room for improvement, perhaps an extra loop or some repainting. Meanwhile, my Arabic skills feel more like a mountain, a large land mass full of flora and fauna, of which I have only explored a small section. While I’ve acquired the basics of hiking a mountain and I’ve cataloged a few flowers, much of its beauty is still slightly out of reach, waiting to be discovered.

Jaimie is a junior at Smith college and a linguistics major and Arabic minor planning to continue their language studies abroad as soon as it safe to do so. Jaimie hopes to help bridge gaps in linguistic and cultural understanding between communities in the US and the Middle East.

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Explaining the Joke

I have a weird love-hate relationship with translation jokes. On one hand, that little rift between languages makes me chuckle. I think back to myself in the old days, a clueless kid who only had half of the riddle. It reminds me of how far I’ve come as a person.

On the other hand, how good a joke is doesn’t just depend on the joke. Jokes are inherently social. Whether you’re sharing one on the internet for likes and comments or telling one to a friend, there is a certain satisfaction you glean from being able to cause laughter. Because so many of my friends are American (read: non-Chinese speakers), they don’t get why I chuckle.

All jokes are inside jokes in some capacity. They rely on some sense of community. Translation jokes like this one are only funny to people like me who have hopped between two specific languages, and that reminds me of the weird position I’m in. Instead of bridging the gap between two cultures and languages, I hang between them, suspended, never fully inside of one or the other. I am the overlap of a Venn diagram that doesn’t exist outside of me and a handful of other people. My family, families like mine, and some friends.

Once upon a time, I lived in a monolingual world. It was as long ago as any fairytale. My experience overseas hasn’t just given me another language. It has fundamentally changed the way that I think, the way that I communicate, share, even laugh. I’ve always loved words and how they connect people, but now they are much richer. I can’t even remember what it felt to live with a singular language housed in my brain. Language connects, but it also separates, sometimes even isolates.

In the past, this picture would not have made me laugh. Aside from the fact that I probably have developed a worse sense of humor than I had at nine, there’s also the fact that I have changed in a way that is not quantifiable. In a way, it’s just like a joke–when you explain it, it becomes less funny, less potent, less correct. The exact combination of words always slides out of your grip.

Even so, I try.

The translation here is funny because the Chinese isn’t meant to indicate direction. Many Chinese sentences, such as this one, end with a word that roughly means “to” in order to indicate movement or purpose. English has no equivalent.

When I first saw this sign, I laughed and snapped a picture. I barely thought about it. The thought process had become part of me. There was no purpose in that, no movement of thought. I saw the words and they clicked.

Occasionally, I remember who I used to be. A little kid who was scared of anything foreign, unwilling to assimilate into the unfamiliar world around me. A little kid who didn’t find my thoughts reflected in the new language I was learning. But I don’t think about that so much anymore.

There is a thoughtlessness in languages. In jokes. And that is part of what makes them elegant and beautiful.

Of course, that’s just part of the story.

 

Xiaoxiao Meng ’19 is a Comparative Literature major and a Translation Studies Concentrator.  She has spent half her life in the United States and the other half in China. This makes for a lot of terrible self-reflection on identity, culture, and the difficulty of explaining how good real soup dumplings are to American friends.

 

 

 

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Connection and Disconnect in Translation

My sensei, which means teacher or mentor in Japanese, has known me since I was four years old. While he understands English, he always writes to me in Japanese, in his exceptional calligraphy, difficult for me to read because it is a style I am not familiar with. When I was younger I delayed returning his letters because I was insecure and shy about my language ability. As I grew older I found it even harder to express myself and my ideas because I was not in full control of the language. This motivated me to develop my Japanese language skills when I entered college and began my linguistic transition.

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In the winter of 2012, my sensei and I went to Tokyo Station, after the completion of its 5-year renovation to restore it to pre-World War II condition. Going with my sensei held deep meaning for me, because I have always admired the rich history of the station, with its mix of Western architecture and Japanese railway design. With its red brick and circular dome, the building itself symbolized my cultural and linguistic experience  learning English and Japanese. It was the West and the East, two opposing forces that would normally clash, coming together to create something unique and beautiful.

Although I grew up bilingual in America, and did not have the Japanese background the rest of my family had, our miscommunications were dismissed as cultural difference, and I felt my family often did not try to understand my ideas or me as an individual. “You’re American, you wouldn’t understand,” they would say, to end any conversation in which I struggled to follow or simply expressed disagreement. My elders would treat me as something foreign, despite the blood relation, and I wanted them to know who I was as a person, and to make a connection with me. Through my efforts to translate the complex thoughts I was having in English into Japanese, I came to understand that translation is not perfect. I realized that you cannot fully capture the meaning of a thought in the language in which it was not thought, and that oftentimes in instant translation, the challenge is to get as close as you can.

At the same time, I discovered aspects of my personality that could only be expressed in Japanese, and that words and concepts exist in the two languages that do not have equivalents in the other. I connected better with my family, but not in the way I originally thought I would. I know that there will always be a part of me that is foreign to them, as well as to others who identify solely as Japanese. And yet, I feel closer to them now, in a way that differs from the closeness I have with English speakers.

This combination of connection and disconnect is what fascinates me about translation. My racial and cultural background demanded linguistic and geographical transitions from a young age, but this personal linguistic transition lead me to realize my love for translation, a significant part of my identity. My hope is that through translation I can recreate the harmony of the Tokyo Station building that I visited with my sensei, and to act as a bridge between two cultures and languages.

 

gilligan_2016-04-05-author-imageVictoria Gilligan is a student of government and language, and is fascinated by the interplay between the two studies. Her academic interests include translation in all forms, but her projects have focused on the exploration of linguistic identity by biracial or bicultural people. Her nonacademic interests include rock climbing and all things outdoors. She is a 2016 expected graduate with a double major in Government and East Asian Languages and Literatures, and a Translation Studies Concentration.

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Staring Down a Whole Library: How I Became Less Afraid of Learning Yiddish

There is a photo in which I look absolutely terrified. This photo was taken at the National Yiddish Book Center, during my first week of Yiddish classes, in the middle of what the employees of the book center fondly call “the stacks.” Behind the camera, rows upon piles upon boxes of books written in Yiddish stare me down. In front of the camera, fear radiates from all of my pores.

Translators at the Yiddish Book Center, Amherst, MA.
Translators at the Yiddish Book Center, Amherst, MA.

The program that I participated in, the Steiner Summer Yiddish Program, brought together a group of nineteen students and gave us the materials to learn Yiddish at the National Yiddish Book Center. Our days were split between class, clubs, and activities, but for the first few weeks all I could do to stay afloat was to study long hours, often late into the night. I had long ago accepted that I was a slow language learner, and honestly, at that point, most of my classmates had reached the same conclusion. I could actually feel people scoot their chairs away from mine when it was time for group work. It was starting to become discouraging, and the fear that photo captured, of being unable to learn, remained tangible. The ultimate moment of rejection came when, as a member of Translation Club, I was asked to visually translate the text our group was working on. In other words, my club-mates would translate while I drew the pictures.

I was resentful, but who knew that the best way to make me do something is to tell me that I can’t do it at all? I started studying, even more intensely, with some vague intention of proving everybody wrong, and eventually moved up the ranks in the classroom. I found myself being able to help others, instead of always raising my hand for assistance. I consulted dictionaries, and sat among countless drafts of the translation. At the end of the seven weeks, I presented the translation that our club had put together as a group. It included my illustrations, but also my hard work translating a portion of the short story from English into Yiddish.

When I graduated from the program, I took the time to walk through the stacks once again. There are thousands of books there. Sholem Aleichem, Mendele the Book Peddler, S. An-ski, Peretz, Khava Rosenfarb, Israel Rabon, the list goes on. I wasn’t afraid of them anymore. I knew that with enough hours spent with my nose in the dictionary and a pen in my hand, I could eventually read any of them. And I would. The photo of me at the beginning of the program would contrast greatly against a picture you might take of me in the stacks today. I have learned that with enough hard work, a literature full of history, philosophy, political ideology, religion, and vibrant culture lays at my fingertips, and I have learned that Yiddish is not something to be afraid of. Not at all.

 

schneider_2016-03-28-author-image.png (966×700)Hannah Schneider is a Jewish Studies major at Smith College, where she concentrates in Yiddish translation. To date, she has translated the children’s story “A Memorial by the Stream,” by Moyshe Levin, and is in the process of working with professor Justin Cammy, and several other translators, on the first draft into English of Avrom Sutzkever’s memoir, “Vilna Ghetto.”

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