Category Archives: vocab

Cool Word – キャッシュオン

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I have an article online today over at CNNGo Tokyo. I give a brief introduction to 和製英語 (わせいえいご) and list a few of my favorites. One of these is キャッシュオン, which is a shortened form of キャッシュオンデリバリー. I learned the phrase at Dry Dock, but Ushitora also has キャッシュオン events. I love the way the word sounds, and it’s a lot of fun to overpronounce it. Although, whenever I say it now, I say it with a Cajun accent, a la Cajun Man.

While I’m here, I should go ahead and do a mini-rinkage post.

“Big (only) in Japan? Oshibori”

I’ve had a bit of reverse culture shock since I’ve been home. The most notable shock has been shoes in the house. Hate it. After that, I guess it’s a toss up between cash-less shopping, the frigid temperatures people in New Orleans keep their ACs set at, and eating food with hands. For the first few weeks I felt a weird sensation of never having enough money on me. In Japan, not having enough cash can have serious consequences – like having to walk home a really long ways or go hungry/thirsty for longer than is pleasant. I’ve gotten over it thanks to my debit card, which can be used just about everywhere in the U.S. I’ve also realized why people bring sweaters to the library – the library is super cold! Come on, people, 68F is not a normal inside temperature. The other weird sensation I have is that my hands are constantly dirty. Part of this is due to the lack of chopsticks, part of this is do to the prevalence of hand feedin’, and part of it is due to the lack of oshibori. I seriously miss oshibori.

Cool Kanji – 末

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Hooray for the weekend! This semester I don’t have any class or work on Friday, so I automatically get 三連休, and this particular weekend expands to 四 thanks to Labor Day. (HOLY SHIT IT’S GOOD TO BE A STUDENT!)

The Japanese for weekend is 週末 (しゅうまつ). The kanji 末 is a handy one to recognize. It often gets used as a suffix to mean the end of something. For example, 年末, 期末, 月末, and 世紀末 among others. Once you recognize it, you’ll be able to parse it as a suffix in unknown vocab much more easily.

(Note: Never confuse 期末 [きまつ, end of school term] with 末期 [まつご, end of life, terminal]. Damn you, Japonese and your flipable compounds.)

It also gets pronounced すえ and used in the construction “X〜た末、Y.” It still means an “end” of sorts in this case, just an end of the verb that comes before it, implying the English tone of “after much ~ing, Y occurred/I managed to Y/I did Y.”

Examples:

いろいろ考えた末、日本で留学することにした。 After thinking about it quite a bit/After much consideration, I decided to study abroad in Japan.

長い間がんばった末、やっと翻訳の仕事を見つけた。 After a lot of hard work, I finally found a translation job. (Weird translation – ignore it, remember the Japonese, please.)

Project Management Lingo – 改行

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Translation isn’t only about content: often presentation is just as important. One of the most important aspects of presentation is 改行 (かいぎょう) – line breaks. There are two reasons for this.

The first is that a lot of Japanese content comes formatted with line breaks after every sentence. This formatting is especially prevalent in Powerpoint presentations.

You should always format the paragraph yourself when translating or editing a translation.
Always.
Otherwise you’ll end up with text that is shaped very strangely.
This is an exaggeration, of course.
But in Japanese, this doesn’t look as strange.
Part of it is because Japanese sentences are so long.
And the other part is that it’s much more standard to add line breaks manually in Japanese.
Check out an email from a Japanese person.
I think most Japanese people rarely make it to the end of a line without a manual line break.
Do your best to format the text into coherent paragraphs.
Often the Japanese will have an extra line break between sections, which should give you a hint at appropriate paragraphing.

The other important aspect of line breaking has less to do with presentation and more to do with programming. Because video game text has to fit on a screen, generally there is a cap on the number of characters per line: a “character limit” – 文字制限 (もじせいげん). I don’t know much about the specifics of how this works, to be honest, other than that translators and project managers have to abide by the character limits provided by game companies. Some companies have automatic solutions, but others still input the line breaks manually.

Japanese fonts are all monospaced (each character occupies a uniform amount of space), so it’s relatively easy to break the lines. English fonts are not, at least not always. Certain fonts are monospaced, the classic example being Courier. With a monospaced font, you can set a rubric for yourself at the top of a document. Say that the limit is 32 characters. Type out “abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz” – that gives you 26 characters, and you can add numbers to fill it out: abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz123456. 32 characters. In the words of Emeril, BAM. Remember that this just gives you a rough estimate. You should be counting the characters as you go. (And, no, a character limit is not a good excuse for a poor translation.)

Depending on which version of Microsoft Excel you have, you can also use macros to count the number of characters. I’m not very good with coding and the macro I was taught at work doesn’t appear to work on Open Office nor on Office Mac 2008 (my current platforms), so I won’t pass it on for fear of passing out poor info. Anyone know any cool macros to count characters?

Cool Compound – 未明

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Still trying to get my feet under me back home. I’m not jetlagged anymore, but I’m still in the process of getting organized, so just a small cool compound this week.

This post, “Reading Strategies – Skimming and Kanji Compounds,” on how to break down different kanji compounds is probably one of the most important that I’ve written. Study Japanese long enough and eventually you make it to the point where kanji compounds don’t even look like two characters – they parse like a single word when you read them. But inevitably you’ll come across ones that you can’t remember or don’t recognize. In those cases knowing how the characters work together is invaluable.

One of the prefixes which I did not include in the prefix/suffix category is 未. It implies incompletion. You see compounds like 未払い (みばらい, unpaid), 未婚 (みこん, unmarried), etc. While reading 1Q84 I came across this compound 未明 (みめい), which I hadn’t seen before but figured out from context and the characters. 明 means dawn or to dawn, and when prefixed with 未  it takes on pre-dawn or early dawn connotations – I guess when it’s light out but the sun has not risen yet. Pretty cool. This Google Images image best expresses the idea.

Game Lingo – キャラセレ

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Technically I’m on vacation, so all you get is a measely little game lingo post today.

This word baffled me for a while when I came upon it during a job. I believe I was translating a game manual, and there weren’t any images in the manual to give me a clue as to what it referred to. I kept reading it “carousel.” That is until I was saved by the power of Google Images. I just popped the fucker into Google and voilà – character selection. The image results from the search are pretty clear – this word refers to the screen in games where you choose your character from all the possible choices. I don’t think there’s a set term for this in English. “Character select screen” or “character selection screen” both seem fine (although the latter sounds a smidge better?), so look for previous usages within the game text.

In Japanese it’s important to be on the lookout for words that have been shortened from longer compounds. Maintain vigilance.

ジンギスカン ≠ Genghis Khan

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ジンギスカン =    

Genghis Khan =  

This inequality is only sometimes true; although, when it is true, it also holds true that ジンギスカン = incredibly tasty. Check out my review of Kitaichi Club, an Oimachi Jingisukan-ery, over at CNNGo Tokyo.

The Internet is divided on the actual origin of the term jingisukan. English Wikipedia seems pretty confident in its proclamation that the grill resembled the helmets of Mongolian warlords, but I couldn’t find any Japanese links that supported that point. A link provided by Japanese Wikipedia seems to suggest that Japanese chefs gave the cuisine a cool name so that they could deal with a surfeit of sheep. It sprung up in areas with lots of sheep – Hokkaido and other parts of northern Japan – and I can totally see some chef saying, “Where else do they have sheep? Mongolia? Well, hell, let’s call it Genghis Khan.”

Keep Your Eyes Open – 納品 Redux

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I was out in Futako Tamagawa walking around with my parents this past week, and I noticed this as we walked up to the entrance of the Garden Island annex of Takashimaya:

Yup, those are trucks parked in a special spot for 納品車 – vehicles making deliveries. Closer inspection reveals…

…that the regular parking lot is just over to the right.

This sign was interesting to me because it was the first time I’ve seen 納品 used for actual, physical deliveries. I’d used it often in the office, as I wrote when I introduced the compound, but it was always in regards to nebulous, digital deliveries. Very cool to see it out in the real world.

Game Lingo – タイミングよく

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I have a column in The Japan Times today, “Take your taimingu when translating loan words.” The general idea and many of the examples should be familiar to long time readers, but I use a new example as my main piece of evidence: the video game term タイミングよく.

Here’s the build-up:

Japan has a long history of commandeering words from other languages and making them its own. Kobo Daishi, one of Japan’s first exchange students, allegedly brought back thousands of kanji from China in the eighth century. Words from Portugal and Holland arrived through Nagasaki roughly 1,000 years later. More recently, Japanese has borrowed from English and other languages, and hence there are now legions of words that require thought before you can convert them back into their source language.

Go buy a copy or check it out online.

号外 – Witch Girls

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New post over on Japan Pulse about the “Witch Girl” phenomenon that briefly jumped up into the top of the keyword searches on Google and goo this past Thursday. I have to give props to my editor Mark who pointed out the phenomenon to me. When I sat down to write the post on Thursday night, I watched one of the Mixi groups double in size over the course of an hour. Buzzter, a Japanese Twitter amalgamator site, clearly shows the extent of the buzz on Thursday:

The Twitter-verse seemed nonplussed. I screen-grabbed a couple of the funniest tweets I could find:

Witch Girls hahahahaha Mountain Girls hahahahaha Swamp Girls hahahahaha

I pretty much understood Forest Girls, but what the heck are Witch Girls?! Ha, what?!

So Witch Girls come after Forest Girls? It's like the next new single, right? But who would want to be called a Witch Girl?

What the hell are Witch Girls? hahaha First time I've heard it hahahaha Girl witches are cute tho.

Cool Compound – 相乗

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Japanese companies love the concept of 相乗 (そうじょう) – different groups working together to produce something that is greater than the sum of its parts. Toy divisions within a company making figurines of characters from the video games produced by a different division of the same company. Characters from one title making cameo appearances in another title. Collectible trading cards that appear in video games and anime television series.

This, my friends, is synergy, and basically it’s a way to draw consumers into loops of consumption that boost the company’s bottom line. In Japanese, synergy is 相乗 (そうじょう). I don’t have a feel for how often U.S. businesses use “synergy” in their consumer propaganda (advertising), but it is used quite frequently here. I first encountered 相乗 after I started working at my former company when I was checking the translation of some sort of annual report – year-end figures down, yada yada, still we have our best-selling series that always sell reliably, yada yada, if only we can get some synergy going, yada yada, repackage old content for a new platform or give it a couple new bells and whistles, ta da!

“Synergy” in English feels a little catch-phrasey to me, but I think 相乗 in translation should be kept simple; just find a way to translate it as “synergy” no matter how the Japanese is used and keep the English from sounding too weird. Never use weird forms like “synergistic” or “synergism.” This is probably one of those words you’ll only ever have to recognize: don’t plan on using 相乗 anytime soon.

While corporate synergy is nothing more than a catch phrase strategy to suck cash from bozos like us, Internet synergy is what makes the world go round. If you think about it, the Internet is nothing more that an elaborate Rube Goldberg machine. There are big flashy patches of content out there, and things like Twitter, Facebook, and blogrolls are the little springs that whirl and tumble about helping make connections. Sometimes the links just sputter out like a decent one-liner tweet, but other times connections produce nice collaborations. It’s the Internet, stupid. And synergy is the way you play the game.

In addition to Collabo-Ramen, I’ve got a couple other mini-synergies in the works. The latest is Kotaku – they just syndicated my post on project management. Others coming soon.