| Pages in topic: < [1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13] | Off topic: In my craft or sullen art: JA-EN financial translation Thread poster: Dan Lucas
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Dan Lucas 
United Kingdom
Local time: 21:07
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER | Chopping and changing | Apr 9 |
Wood anemones scattered under the trees in Pentre Ifan
It's been a busy day. Several clients contacted me with various requests this morning, one of which was a complete reorganization of the couple of dozen projects that they had already booked. I'll need time to look at that. Somebody else asked about booking a job, but then withdrew the offer.
A... See more
Wood anemones scattered under the trees in Pentre Ifan
It's been a busy day. Several clients contacted me with various requests this morning, one of which was a complete reorganization of the couple of dozen projects that they had already booked. I'll need time to look at that. Somebody else asked about booking a job, but then withdrew the offer.
A third client inquired about availability for three projects in early June, which I should have no problem doing. She also asked, again, about a job in the middle of May that she offered to me more than a week ago but which I declined because it is too large and the deadline is too tight given everything else that is going on at that time.
It looks like she's having difficulty placing that one, which is not surprising given that it coincides with the absolute peak of busy season. I'd like to help her out, but I simply don't think I have enough hours in the day to be able to take that on, especially given that I do not know the end client. Bit of a problem, really.
As for the ongoing translation project, that is chugging away nicely now. I should be able to hit the deadline, after a couple of worrying days.
Dan ▲ Collapse
| | | | Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 21:07
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER | What does a Japanese fish know of English sticky toffee pudding? | Apr 10 |
With no projects underway, today was an opportunity to immerse myself in thought about deep and important themes in the serious business of Japanese ... See more
With no projects underway, today was an opportunity to immerse myself in thought about deep and important themes in the serious business of Japanese financial translation. Instead I immersed myself in the serious business of making a pudding. (When time permits, Wednesday is pudding day in this house.)
Puddings are not difficult but they are what my late father would have called "a bit of a faff." After preparing the mix, you spoon it into a pudding bowl and tie on a lid of foil using a piece of twine, so that the water or steam cannot get into the pudding itself. I cheat and use special heat-resistant silicone bands.
Traditionally you then steam the pudding in a pan on top of the stove for an hour or so, but it gets in the way and can be quite dangerous. Fortunately the big cooker has three ovens, and the bottom right one is set to 100C. We use this oven for slow cooking, warming things (my parents used a similar oven on their cooker to revive hypothermic lambs, a not-uncommon task in this part of the world), and preventing warm things from getting cold. I have discovered that if you put the pudding in the bottom oven for around four hours, it comes out perfectly, every time. Although puddings have a reputation for being heavy and stodgy, a well-cooked pudding is quite the opposite: it should be downright airy. Mine always are.
As I prepared today's sticky toffee pudding, I ruminated on the differences between Japanese and English desserts. Japanese deserts tend to be lighter, less rich, and smaller. While a daifuku is not exactly the equivalent of a sticky toffee pudding, it is perhaps a good illustration of the broader difference.
I think the best wagashi I ever had were at a lunch thrown by the president of a textile company on the western coast of Japan. We had just visited one of its factories, where we stood in the half-darkness of a production line several stories high, watching nylon filaments spin down from the ceiling like spider silk before disappearing into the blackness below. There were so many of these shimmering threads, so close together, that from certain angles they looked like vertical skeins of water.
Although the lunch was only a bento, it was exquisite. I think the president was anxious to show off the quality of the regional cuisine, and in that he was eminently successful. The wagashi were amazingly light and fluffy, and both taste and textures were sensational. The place where we sat looked out over the sea of Japan, the view was excellent, and the weather was fine. It was a good day, one of many on such trips, but I didn't recommend the stock in the end.
I remembered that visit today while I was making pudding, and thought about the perspective that is offered to those who have lived abroad by choice for a long period of time. It is only by knowing the other country that you can come to know your own. This is not a new sentiment of course, and has perhaps its most pithiest expression in Kipling's "And what should they know of England who only England know?".
Not quite so concise were the words of Donald Richie, in an interview held not long before he died in 2013, after more than half a century in Japan. I reproduce them here, because I think that what he says will resonate with some of the members of this forum.
Q. Do you still feel like a foreigner?
Yes. I think if I didn't feel like a foreigner, I wouldn't be here. I'm here because I'm a foreigner, because I like being a foreigner. It's so rewarding to not have to belong to things, to not be allowed to belong to things. It's really so free. When I was in Ohio, taking things for granted, it never occurred to me that I could lead a life in which I set my own obligations and decided how I wanted to comport myself. If you never leave your own culture, you're forever bound by it, and you're bound without ever realizing it. If you ask a person in America or Japan about American or Japanese culture, it's like asking a fish about water. What can they say? They inhabit it, they don't know anything about it. When you come over here, or anyplace different, you get your eyes opened, and you can never get them shut again.
(My italics)
[Edited at 2024-04-10 20:34 GMT] ▲ Collapse
| | | | Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 21:07
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER
We realized today that the butcher in Fishguard market offers homemade butter. It's good; very fluffy and not too heavily salted.
About six weeks before every quarterly earnings season, one of my clients (let's call them client C) sends me a list of projects they would like me to take on. For the main busy season in April/May, this typically contains more than ... See more
We realized today that the butcher in Fishguard market offers homemade butter. It's good; very fluffy and not too heavily salted.
About six weeks before every quarterly earnings season, one of my clients (let's call them client C) sends me a list of projects they would like me to take on. For the main busy season in April/May, this typically contains more than twenty items, and each item has eight different pieces of information (name of the project manager, volume, deadline, etc.). A couple of weeks before the main earnings season actually begins, the client sends me a revised list.
On each occasion I have to look at these jobs and consider them in the context of the other bookings that have been put in by other clients. I track my projects by creating a new folder in the main work directory that I have on my PC. The folder name contains all the information I need to know, so that I can tell it a glance what I have underway and what is coming up, and thus get a general sense of my own level of activity.
Here is an anonymized version of an actual project name:
U _ 2024-05-07 0900 JST _ 2024-04-30 1900 JST _ Client A, Ms X _ PO-number, End client name _ presentation _ 25000
The name has seven fields, namely: status, deadline, start date, name of client and project manager, name of end client, type of document, and volume.
Status symbol
This should be mostly self-explanatory, but the "U" is just a status flag to let me know that this is scheduled but has not begun (in theory it stands for "Unstarted"). The names of folders representing active projects begin with a "A" for "Active".
I won't blame you if you think this sounds rather overblown for the simple task of taking a text in one language and turning it into a text in another language. Sometimes, when I only have one or two jobs on, I could clearly manage with something a lot simpler.
Earnings season is not one of those times. I currently have forty two projects of varying sizes in my schedule. Some of those will be cancelled, some will come in a good deal lower than expected, and a few will be larger than anticipated - but there will also be some additions. The overall volume and the number of individual projects is unlikely to change significantly.
Just one small slip
When you're dealing with a large number of projects, one of the issues you face is ensuring that what the client requests you to do is what you actually enter in your system. To phrase it slightly differently, if the client asks you to translate a kessan tanshin (決算短信) of 15,000 characters into English with a deadline of 09:00 on 2024-05-21, you really don't want to do this:
U _ 2024-05-21 0900 JST _ 2024-05-15 1900 JST _ Client C, Ms X _ PO-number, BigCompany _ kessan tanshin _ 1500
See the mistake? The volume at the end of the folder name is only 1,500 instead of 15,000. If you don't notice that disparity and you accept the project as being 1,500 characters, then you are going to get a very unpleasant surprise when the project comes in, particularly if you have already committed all your capacity during that period to other jobs. (Don't ask me how I know this.)
Still, I am human, and transcribing twenty-odd projects from a spreadsheet to the respective folder names (remember that I do this so that I can compare the potential jobs to other jobs already booked in the system) is both time-consuming and prone to error. It's easy to make mistakes, frankly, so a couple of years ago I wrote a quick utility in the R programming language that extracts this information directly from the client's spreadsheet and automatically creates folders in my work directory based on the information contained in the Excel file.
I like this approach because it requires no effort on my part, because it minimizes the risk of introducing errors in the information during transcription, and because it literally takes a couple of seconds to run and complete. This is important, because while you are still trying to assess the feasibility of accepting the potential jobs being offered to you by client C, you cannot really accept jobs from other clients. Without creating folders to represent each job, it's hard to see everything in context.
Added bits
However, while I like R, one of its weaknesses is its handling of Japanese (an issue too complicated to get into here). It was partly because of this that I decided to rewrite the script in the Python programming language. Rather than being just a straightforward copy over the R version, I also I wanted to add some new functionality to enable the script to deal more gracefully with unexpected situations such as changes in the format of the spreadsheet, and so on.
I have spent quite a few hours on this over the past day or two, and it is now basically complete. It has been educational and quite enjoyable. It also makes sense to spend time when you have plenty of it available to create something that will save you lots of time when you have very little of it available.
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| | | | Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 21:07
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER
A quiet Friday for me. I was contacted by somebody from a European asset management company wanting an interpreter to handle a question and answer session with a Japanese company. I used to do a lot of that sort of thing at one point in my life, but I dislike zoom calls intensely, especially when there is a time lag. I gave the person some suggestions on finding a specialized interpreter.
I also got a job offer from a regular client. As you can imagine this is not an unusual occurre... See more A quiet Friday for me. I was contacted by somebody from a European asset management company wanting an interpreter to handle a question and answer session with a Japanese company. I used to do a lot of that sort of thing at one point in my life, but I dislike zoom calls intensely, especially when there is a time lag. I gave the person some suggestions on finding a specialized interpreter.
I also got a job offer from a regular client. As you can imagine this is not an unusual occurrence, but this offer came from a project manager who is stationed in a different office, and I have very few dealings with the people at that location. Whatever, we managed to get something together and I have taken on a job (text from a report) of just over six thousand characters.
Finally, a pre-booked job from another client came in a few days early, which is positive rather than negative, but also 30% larger than the ten thousand characters originally expected. The deadline is unchanged, which seems fair enough.
Other than that, just admin. Oh, and I saw this on the footpath this morning. When I searched for the spoor on the internet, it rather unhelpfully suggested "bear". I'm thinking badger myself, with those long claws. I didn't see any other spoor though. Maybe it was hopping on one paw?
The apple tree in the garden is starting to blossom.
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Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 21:07
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER
When the dog and I set out for our early walk, I looked up into the sky and for a second I thought I saw the darting flight of a pair of swallows chasing each other in the first light of the morning - the first of the year. A moment later I realized my mistake: it was two bats getting a final meal in before going to bed. Other than that it was an unremarkable stroll. The lilac at the bottom of the garden is beginning to flower.
One thing I have noticed over the past couple of days i... See more When the dog and I set out for our early walk, I looked up into the sky and for a second I thought I saw the darting flight of a pair of swallows chasing each other in the first light of the morning - the first of the year. A moment later I realized my mistake: it was two bats getting a final meal in before going to bed. Other than that it was an unremarkable stroll. The lilac at the bottom of the garden is beginning to flower.
One thing I have noticed over the past couple of days is the emergence of butterflies. I saw a peacock flying boldly and strongly over the back lawn yesterday, and today when I was in St Dogmaels I saw a speckled wood sitting rather groggily on the road. Due to its position it was in no imminent danger of being run over so I left it be, assuming that it had just woken up.
An occasional client asked me about availability later in the month for a technical marketing text. I almost said no reflexively, but when I thought again about the dates she proposed I realized that it could actually be done before the really busy period begins.
I did a little translation on the larger of my two current projects, but not as much as I had hoped. My usual pattern is that when I have little work on I get lazy, and when I am busy I get super-focused. Having completed the python utility I decided it wasn't good enough, so I refactored it and added some functionality to make it resilient in the face of different file formats.
And so to bed. ▲ Collapse
| | | | TonyTK
German to English
+ ...
| Thrilla in Merthyr | Apr 17 |
Dan Lucas wrote:
dog ... pair of swallows ... two bats ... butterflies ... peacock ... python
More of a spaghetti hoop-fed city boy myself, but can't wait to see how this rural throwdown turns out.
| | | | Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 21:07
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER | Domain-specific knowledge | Apr 17 |
I look over the shoulder of the assistant to whom I have just handed my business card while she scans the list of invitees on her clipboard for my name. The meeting room behind her is empty of people and full of furniture. A phalanx of neatly spaced desks faces a long table at the front. On each desk is a shallow stack of paper, and on the long table at the front is a microphone in its stand. My name is found and ticked, and I am free to choose my place.
My usual practice for compa... See more I look over the shoulder of the assistant to whom I have just handed my business card while she scans the list of invitees on her clipboard for my name. The meeting room behind her is empty of people and full of furniture. A phalanx of neatly spaced desks faces a long table at the front. On each desk is a shallow stack of paper, and on the long table at the front is a microphone in its stand. My name is found and ticked, and I am free to choose my place.
My usual practice for companies in which I am interested is to sit right at the front, and because I do not attend the results meetings of companies in which I do not have an interest, this means that pretty much all the time I end up face to face with management, who sit behind the long table. These meetings are sometimes called earnings briefings, but in Japanese they are usually referred to as 決算説明会, or kessan setsumeikai, the first two characters (kessan) being the same 決算 as in 決算短信 (kessan tanshin), which is the so-called short earnings report, and 説明会 (setsumei-kai) simply meaning "explanatory meeting".
The room begins to fill with other analysts and investors, some from the buy side and a few from the sell side, like myself. There is the quiet hum of conversation as old friends or rivals catch up on a bit of gossip. In some meetings the staff of the facility in which the event is being held will scurry around with jugs of iced water, but today's meeting is clearly a budget affair and there is nothing on the desk. Fair enough.
The company hosting today's meeting is neither large nor well-known outside of the industry, but I like its portfolio of products and think it has plenty of growth potential. Unfortunately, the market agrees with me and I never seem to be able to catch the stock at the bargain price that would make it worth recommending to investors. Sometimes you just have to hold your nose and buy for the long term.
Let battle commence
About three minutes before the meeting is due to start, management enter the room, with a junior person ushering the CEO (president) to the table at the front. There is much settling into seats, unpacking of briefcases, and shuffling of papers. Once esconced, the president looks up to find me in front of him and about five yards away. He nods coolly, and I give a small bow in return. He doesn't remember my name or affiliation, but he does remember that I asked him questions at a meeting six months ago.
And that is really why I am here. The basic figures for the first six months of the year were announced yesterday and are available to everybody, but if I want to hear the spin that the company is putting on the results, if I want to tease out some of the subtleties and form a sense of how senior management is feeling about the business and the industry going forward - if, in short, I want to get what the financial industry calls "color", I need to be at the meeting.
The management has its own agenda. They will have a particular interpretation to push, a certain story to tell, and it is our job as investors and analysts to gauge the correctness of this interpretation, the plausibility of the story. Is the slowing of orders from southern China a blip caused by problems at the factory of one of the company's major customers, as the company would like us to believe, or is it indicative of a secular downturn that could last a couple of years?
The games people play
Sell-side analysts (who work for investment banks or securities companies) will account for only a small proportion of the people in the room, with the largest fraction consisting of buy-side analysts (who work for pension funds or hedge funds or similar), and other investors with an actual or potential interest in the stock. Nevertheless, it is overwhelmingly the sell-side analysts who will ask the questions.
I like to put my hand up first and get the first question in, just to keep the other analysts on their toes, and to signal to others that I am a participant in the discussion rather than a passive observer. Many people in this room are, potentially at least, my clients, so it is good to have them aware of my presence. Other analysts like to ask long and convoluted questions to show that they are on top of the minutiae. Occasionally an analyst will deliberately raise a particular subject to try and jam it into the minds of the attending shareholders and investors.
It may be that this analyst believes that there is something - for example, the expiry of an important patent held by a competitor that will enable this company to enter a new market - to which other analysts and investors are not paying enough attention. By raising it in a question like this, they can highlight its salience and try to change the narrative about the company. It is not so much a question as a statement, a big fat arrow pointing at what somebody believes to be important.
Non-questions and non-answers
In response to non-questions like these, the management would be within its rights to give a non-answer, and sometimes they do. The blunt weapon is the simple "We don't disclose that." It is pretty much unanswerable, and all the questioner can do is try to dig around the subject. Most of the time, however, the management will want to at least appear to be helpful. This is a solid company, and they are normally pretty cooperative.
The president has finished a short overview of the results, and the question and answer session begins. I raise my hand immediately. The IR manager is hovering at the side of the room, and trots forward to hand me the microphone. I switch on the mike and give my name and company name. My Japanese is very formal, very correct. I have already mentally run through the questions I'm going to ask so that I don't stumble or stutter when I actually have to deliver them.
"If my understanding is correct, you were expecting most of the growth this year to come from Asia ex Japan, which in your case is essentially China, so does the manufacturing problem at your Chinese customer that you mentioned earlier not put your forecasts in danger for the full year?"
The pieces of the puzzle
There is some whispering among those sat at the table, then the president reaches for the microphone and gives it a tentative tap. "Yes it does" he says with disarming frankness. "But it's not that simple. You see, what we expected to be shipping to this particular factory was a material that we customized for them for a new product they are in the process of launching. In essence, it's a new product for their new product." He takes a sip of water.
"As I'm sure you're aware, yields on a new product are usually quite low, and may not be profitable for the first few quarters until we get up to speed. Although we will miss some revenues due to this problem at our customer, it will actually be positive for profits due to the unplanned improvement in the product mix. To put it another way, our sales forecast is looking a bit difficult to achieve, but profits will likely turn out to be ahead of expectations."
I have been scribbling and nodding as he speaks, and now I take a couple of seconds just to put the pieces together in my head. "So... You said that the problem should be resolved by the end of the year, which implies that next year, once you start shipping this product to your customer in volume, you should see a positive impact on sales but a negative impact on profit? Ultimately you will see the same impact, but it's going to be backloaded?"
The president nods affably. "In the short term, yes, but longer term of course it should all work itself out." I thank him and pass the mike to the next questioner who is two desks down.
Whether over the phone or through comments, it's all about talking to people.
After a meeting I trot up to the long table, bow deeply, and thank management for their cooperation. Then I find a quiet corner outside and phone an investor who owns the stock. The share price came off sharply in the afternoon session yesterday when the news of the customer problem came out, but it it doesn't look like a fundamental problem - in the short term, it's probably going to be a positive rather than a negative for profits. I brief the client, promise to send him some figures later, then head back to the office, where I will brief our salesman and make a few more calls.
As other members of the forum have remarked, you don't actually need to be a doctor, analyst, or lawyer to translate medical, financial, or legal texts, and the skills that enable somebody to be a good doctor, analyst, or lawyer have little overlap with the skills required of a good translator. Nevertheless, if you are a decent translator and also have decades of experience in a particular sector or vertical market, that background can provide useful insights that simply cannot be extracted from words on the page alone.
For example, I translate a lot of presentation material (決算説明会資料) from Japanese into English for use at the kind of meetings I describe above. As an analyst, I have also created many dozens of presentations in my time. In other words, I have been both on the giving and receiving end of a Powerpoint file, and I often make suggestions on the layout and content of the English document as I work. English requires more space on the page than Japanese, so it is wise to abbreviate and compress as much as possible. I suspect that most clients choose not to act on my comments, but they are there if they need them.
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This week has been a good one for finches. We had a pair of bullfinches the other day, and this morning some goldfinches were fluttering around on the lawn. Both seem impossibly bright and exotic for west Wales.
Apropos of nothing in particular, here is a tart of pears baked in egg custard, lightly spiced with cinnamon, over a crumble base.
[Edited at 2024-04-18 06:10 GMT] ▲ Collapse
| | | | Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 21:07
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER | Here we go. Hang on. | Apr 23 |
On the one hand, earnings season has arrived early due to a number of jobs being handed off to me ahead of schedule, so for the past few days I have been struggling with deadline after deadline.
On the other hand, all the hard work I did last month resulted in a gratifyingly large payment into my bank account yesterday, reminding me why I take on these projects in the... See more
On the one hand, earnings season has arrived early due to a number of jobs being handed off to me ahead of schedule, so for the past few days I have been struggling with deadline after deadline.
On the other hand, all the hard work I did last month resulted in a gratifyingly large payment into my bank account yesterday, reminding me why I take on these projects in the first place.
Meanwhile spring is unfurling around me like the leaves on the Virginia creeper and the honeysuckle unfurling on the wall of the house.
Onwards and upwards. ▲ Collapse
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MollyRose
United States
Local time: 15:07
English to Spanish
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| The Mystery of the Pictures | Apr 23 |
In March I noticed that some pictures mentioned in the posts were not showing up on my Windows screen, and after clearing the cookies, they still didn´t. But I could see them on my Mac. Today, there were some pictures showing on page 13 that didn´t show up before, so I looked at the previous pages and they are all there now! Maybe MS Edge was updated, or something.
I guess it´s a case of "Now you don't see them, now you do."
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