号外 – Kurodahan Press Translation Prize
A small bonus post today to make up for the skimpy post earlier. Kurodahan Press is having a translation contest. The story for translation is titled 「メルクの黄金畑」 by 髙樹のぶ子, and can be found in her collection titled 『fantasia』. It’s only 15,000 characters long and the deadline is in October, which means you have plenty of time. Professional translators usually translate somewhere from 2000 to 5000 characters a day depending on the type of material. Literary translation should probably take a little longer, but still, the finished product will only end up being somewhere around 8000 words or so. The prize isn’t that much money (30,000 yen), but the winner will get published, it’s a great way to promote Japanese literature, and it would be good goal to set if you are an upper-level intermediate student or lower-level advanced student.
Definitely plan on tossing my hat in the ring. I picked up the book of stories last week and have only paged through the contest story, but it looks like a neat little book of travel stories set in Europe. Fun!
July 23rd, 2009 at 4:17 am
Thanks for the headsup! Sounds like something interesting to try. At least it’ll be fun to compare my effort with other people’s.
I’ll look for the book today. From your short description, at least it doesn’t seem steeped in Japanese tradition like last year’s contest did.
July 24th, 2009 at 9:36 pm
Bought my copy today. I’ll give it a shot. Thanks for the heads up.
July 26th, 2009 at 10:00 am
Good luck with the translation! Literary translation can be quite a challenge but I agree that it’s a good goal to set yourself once you’ve reached a certain level in your language learning. I hope my Japanese will be good enough a few years from now to be able to participate in such contests.
頑張ってね！
August 10th, 2009 at 3:48 pm
Even tho. it’s part of a collection, only the one story must be translated, right?