Translation is a creative act, and it is a hard one, involving a balance of art, respect for the logic and of the original, respect for the meaning in the target language, and a lot of questions for which there are no universal answers.
One example, relevant to the topic discussed in the thread: To what extent should a Japanese document translated for an American audience convey that it was definitely written originally in Japanese.
There are some texts where you could produce two faithful translations of the original, one which utterly sandblasts the performance of culture from it and which will be understood, and one which maintains the performance and will be impenetrable to the target audience.
Relatedly, and this happens in both directions:
“If we want this document to sound like an American wrote it, should it sound like the stereotypical view relatively poorly informed Japanese people have of Americans, or should it sound like how Americans might speak in Japanese.”
“That can’t possibly be a live question.”
Oh it sure is, for example in translating expressions of patriotic sentiment in the US from political figures, where it’s easy to making anyone on the spectrum sound like a restore-the-empire ultranationalist if you do it wrong.
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Today's new phrase in Japanese, regarding a company's explanation about policies: 支離滅裂, which appeared in a text from my wife and which I couldn't read. This does not generally suggest the word will be positive.
Having checked the dictionary, apparently it means this:
As long as I'm on fun linguistic notes, let me note that the only word I've seen the third character in frequently is 撲滅 (bokumetsu, exterminate), which was part of the tagline for the Stamp Out Piracy campaign at movie theatres before the feature rolled.
And in checking that I realized that for several years I've been mispronouncing that word as "bakametsu" (爆滅, to slaughter with explosives), which explains a number of previously mysterious negative interactions during discussions of IP law and piracy with coworkers.
After a year which has often been trying for institutions, glad to see that we’re still hypercapable in places like logistics, air travel regulation, etc.
When I heard reports that the vaccine required low temperatures in transit I thought “Hmm people seem worked up about this but that sounds like the sort of things Ops just lives for. Only question is whether it is solved already or will take O(days) of prework.”
(I heard this from less informed commenter here too, “Do you think we can distribute it across the country in under a month?”, and contingent on supplies being sufficient I think Japanese logistics firms could probably deliver to 99% of clinics in country synchronized to an hour)
I love this and, phrased obliquely to not step on Amazon’s moment, it is standard practice at many emulation-worthy tech companies, with varying levels of CEO involvement.
Pro-tip: almost all BigCo will l do this for paper letters addressed to the CEO or office of the president.
I used to ghostwrite letters to banks as a hobby, and the prototypical subject of them was a grandmother in Kansas in financial distress. The reply was usually from someone like “Senior Vice President, Consumer Lending.”
Unfortunately, and this is a useful thing to know about the sociology of large corporations, sending a letter to the CEO addressed to the PO Box on your statement is not nearly as effective, since it will go to the standard peon with limited capability to do anything but usual.
Simultaneously a bit impressed that a Japanese firm had a process for handling a CS request in English including multiple UX accordances for foreigners (“this can be completed from abroad”) and a bit irked they did not notice the request was written in Japanese and began...
“I am a permanent resident of Japan who has lived here for 15 years, owns property in Tokyo, and speaks professional Japanese.” specifically to avoid being brushed off as being hard to deal with.
(The property thing is directly relevant to the request but also has the knock on effect of suggesting something important about social class and capability of navigating complex interactions.)
Twice this holiday season already I’ve had transactions refunded by fraud teams who think it extremely unlikely that one Patrick McKenzie of Tokyo would do a transaction he has done many, many times before.
False positives are also a cost; one transaction will just not happen.
General flavor: buying low-dollar consumer electronics as a gift, buying high dollar travel gift cards from issuer to pre-pay anticipated travel expense post-covid (and take advantage of a credit card offer).
In both cases they went all the way through and then I got a transaction reversed email days later, which suggests manual review by a fraud team at either the issuer or the counterparty, and it wasn’t the issuer.
An interesting email from Chase for what it implies about how sophisticated they’re getting in tying servicing and marketing.
So banks don’t want losing a branch to lose them the local deposit base, so strategically this makes sense. And the mail has the address and a map for the nearest branch to the closing branch right below the fold, which impressed me.
Someone wrote some non-trivial code for this.
That said, I think I went to that branch once, more than 5+ years ago, so I think they could probably have saved their “dust off patio11’s inbox” karma for something more strategically important to them.