J. Carpenter Readings (Umi)

 Jumping Into The Pond:

In this article, Juliet W. Carpenters discusses her experiences with translation and I feel as if I got a lot of insight on the delights as well as the challenges of being a translator. In her paper, she discusses onomatopoeias in children's books which often gave her a hard time (i.e. どきどき, わくわく, ぱぱぱっと, etc.), which introduced me to another challenging aspect of translating. For instance, up until this point, I have been aware of a lot of the challenges that comes to English <--> Japanese translation such as cultural differences, humor, sentence structure, etc., but I had completely forgotten about the existence of onomatopoeias until Carpenters mentioned it. Later on in the article, she discusses the intricacies of translating Japanese poems. More specifically, she mentions that you can keep the images in the same order in translation, but other times you can’t. And just changing the order in which the images occur in a poem makes it a completely different poem -- to which I completely agree. Especially after reading the different translations of the haikus and tankas during class time, I even thought that some of the translations were not necessarily "poor" per se, but they were sort of changing the overall mood of the original poems. 

True Collaboration on A True Novel

In this Carpenters interview about her translation process of Mizumura's "A True Novel", I was fascinated by Carpenters' stories regarding the translating procedure behind the scenes and working with Mizumura to finalize the translation. Throughout the interview, the main topic is Juliet's partnership with Mizamura and I really liked hearing about the way they creatively collaborated with each other to work their own ideas into the translation, and it really made me understand the mutual respect that translators and authors have for each other. Later on in the interview, Elliott Sensei brings up specific details from "A True Novel" and asks Juliet key questions about why she chose to translate certain things the way she did. I feel as if this gave extremely valuable insight into the way Juliet, and not just Juliet, but the way translators think as well as how they have to cooperate with their authors to add miniscule details here and there even if they do not necessarily agree with it. To conclude the interview, I noticed that Elliott Sensei hit Juliet with a bunch of simple questions which only required short answers which I believe was to give Juliet a break after answering some tough questions regarding her translating process, which I found to be kind. Overall, I enjoyed hearing about Juliet's collaboration process with Mizamura and I feel as if my respect for translators deepened more after hearing about all they have to go through when translating.