Monday, March 24, 2008

Funny sort of Easter

For the first time in my life, Easter basically didn't happen to our family this year. We spent it moving Kentaro's stuff to his new hospital, four hours up the expressway. Easter came much earlier than usual in any case, and my usual source of Cadbury's chocolate eggs, the FBC Britshop, closed down last year because of the strong pound (sniff). Seventeen years away from the UK have finally accustomed me to Good Friday being a normal working day, but until last year I'd always been to church on Easter Sunday. This year, we were camping out in sleeping bags in Kentaro's new house on the hospital grounds, doing without a bath as the gas wasn't connected, and rushing to go shopping at the nearest big home center before returning the rented van to the rental company by lunchtime and driving back down to Osaka in our own car.

I did manage to make hot cross buns. I feel a bit proud of myself for that; sneaking a tiny taste of British Easter into the rush and stress of getting a van, a car, two kids, appliances (many kindly given us for free by friends who were leaving the country), furniture, books, futons, and miscellaneous stuff loaded up and driven to Tokai. I slipped the ingredients into the bread machine after coming back from collecting a free washing machine, shaped the dough in a couple of minutes snatched while loading up the van, and got them into the oven 20 minutes before we were due to leave. They were baked and thrown in a paper bag about two minutes before we ran out of the door to pick up Kei from Saturday school on the way to the expressway. As I drove our car with the kids behind Kentaro in the van, their aroma tantalized us for the entire journey. Early Sunday morning I dug the toaster and coffee maker out of the depths of the van, and offered my Japanese family an Easter breakfast.

Dan didn't like them, and demanded ordinary bread instead. Oh well.

There were times during the weekend when I thought we must have been crazy trying to do this with the kids in tow. It certainly would have been easier to have left them with my parents-in-law and gone up with just the two of us - shopping at the home center without the boys having ear-splitting Pokemon battles up and down the aisles would have been a lot less stressful, for one thing. But I am glad we went up there as a family. Now when Kentaro leaves next weekend at least the boys will have an image of where he's living, and we've left our sleeping bags for when we go up to visit.

Monday, March 10, 2008

I take it all back....

Maybe our local city government isn't so bad after all. Even if their prose is mindnumbingly bureaucratic, at least they're sensible enough to get it properly translated.

One of my jobs today was proofreading a brochure for a different city. Up to about two thirds of the way through the English was at least comprehensible, if not all that grammatical. But then it suddenly turned into sentences like this:

They argue at the equal viewpoint as the engine of which it became independent respectively also though it's exchange of cooperating each other, city council and city chief are making an effort toward improvement of a life of city people

The person whose job it was to produce the English version must have run out of time and just thrown the last part through some translation software. I ended up sending it back to the agency with a plea for them to request the original Japanese; OK, I could have a stab at making some sense out of this, but it would be a creative reconstruction akin to trying to reproduce a portrait of someone's face using nothing but a heap of splintered skull bones.

In a sense it is reassuringly bad, though. At least computers aren't going to be putting us human translators out of a job any time soon.

Friday, March 7, 2008

Comments (please)

A couple of people have told me they've tried to comment on previous posts but haven't been able to, so I've fiddled around with the settings a bit. Hopefully it should work now, so please do have another go! (I love getting comments.)

Thursday, March 6, 2008

So tired

I've been pretty overwhelmed with work the past few days. March is the busiest season for translators, as all our clients are trying to use up their translation budgets by the end of the financial year, so suddenly a whole raft of agencies that might have contacted me three or four times in the past year are emailing and phoning with job offers. I'm having to turn them all down, as my regular clients are keeping me quite busy enough already; tonight is the third night in a row I've been up well past midnight, attempting to turn mindnumbingly bureaucratic prose from the city government Web site into something that's hopefully vaguely readable in English. As the saying goes, though, garbage in, garbage out ... especially at this time of night. Honestly, some of the stuff I've been having to deal with lately makes Vogon poetry sound relatively appealing.

But I did go out for a rare night on the town with three fabulous friends last Saturday evening, and laughed more than I had in what seems like years. If you're reading this, girls, THANK YOU! Now I just have to find a babysitter who can persuade the boys to go to sleep (something even Kentaro can't do - the three of them eventually crashed out together on our bed at nearly midnight, apparently) so we can do it again soon.