On "Eight Ways to Say You"

 Cathy Hirano’s “Eight Ways to Say You: The Challenges of Translation” was a very interesting read in that it gave me a lot of perspective on how deep and complex the process of translation can be. Many of the things she says in the beginning are things I have experienced before when interacting with Japanese to English translation, but not explicitly thought of. The analogy she uses of translation being like putting together a jigsaw puzzle was quite interesting and was something I understood quite well. Like when translating a Japanese that doesn’t have a specific English word it correlates to, you pick and choose different English words until you find the one that fits.

 

The other aspects of translation she touches on, such as the cultural and contextual meaning behind words like “Juku” were also interesting to me. Because I am a Korean-American, the idea of cram school is pretty familiar to me. I was also put into one as early as middle school, so I hadn’t really thought about how weird that might be to someone who had never even heard of it before. So it was quite interesting to see how Hirano dealt with this problem in her translation of The Friends. I knew before reading this that translation work was pretty different to, say, interpretation, in that it sometimes requires some editing of the source material in order to stay true to the original tone of the Japanese work, but I had never thought of adding completely new passages to give context to the reader before.

 

Overall, I think this was a very interesting read and it taught me a lot about the obstacles that translators face outside of simply translating the text word for word. It was also nice to read about how Hirano was able to share her love of translation with her children.

 

Kenny