Looking for a Japanese fluent in English (translator)

Hi,

I'm looking for a Japanese native fluent in English (translator) with a passion for Biology & Natural farming. I have recently bought a Japanese book, that I would like to have translated with love and dedication.
I can do a google translation myself, but would like to have it done right. Hope someone here can help.

It might be easier to find a native English speaker who is also fluent in Japanese? Idunno. I gave up on learning enough kanji to read like a grown-up a long time ago. Did you check to see that there's not already a translation available? You would need to pay someone to translate a whole book and it wouldn't be cheap, so it doesn't make much sense to do it unless the book's been licensed for publishing in English, and in that case the original publishing company and author will have their say in who translates it. Nobody's gonna do this for free. Are you working on behalf of a publishing company?
My brother translates from German to English so my impressions of the process are based on that.
Anyway you will not have the right to publish said translation without making a legal agreement with the author/publisher. Which means $$$.

Hi Sarah,
thank you for your reply. I translate myself Italian, English, German... mainly. And I am acquainted with the legal procedures. As long as I don't publish the translation, I'm allowed to translate it. The book is pre 1950s and sadly, there are no english translations of it. I also don't believe, that it has been republished in the last 40 years.
I'm specifically looking in this forum, since it is sort of a lost bible for natural farmers and I would want somebody, that is really interested in the topic to translate it. I'm aware, that there is a cost involved
It's not easy to find somebody on google with a degree in farming related fields (horticulture, agriculture, biology...) that also speaks fluently Japanese and English. There are concepts in there that would require at least some specific knowledge when translating.

Generally the rule, as you know, is to translate into your native language. And if you translate you know that unless you're able to scan and convert into something that can be run through a CAT tool, this is going to cost you big bucks. I no longer work with JP>EN (I've been outside of Japan for too long, my Japanese is contaminated with the weird Okinawa/Kansai-ben the descendents here speak so I let my certification go as I moved to my new language pair) but we've found some handwritten family diaries and after 10+ years as a professional translator using CATs, I can tell you I will never do a handwritten or non-CAT-tool job in Japanese again. May as well go back to the days of pencil and notebook when I started!
So not only will it cost for a whole book, but also the "PITA fee" for format issues if it is an old book.

My suggestion would be to do what you can to OCR scan and get it so that it can be run through auto translation and then try to get someone to do PEMT. If you put up this job on a platform like Proz or Translators Café you're probably going to get someone who is native in neither Japanese or English, so you may as well have google do a free job that is probably better than what that final product might be, then see if you can find a friendly-minded person to do your revision.
Just my 2 yen. (many years a translator, in this language pair)

Thank you for taking the time. That was very helpful. I mainly translated legal documents, brochures, meetings and conferences. It was never my main job and we're talking 90s, so yeah... MS Word is all I know.
I am native trilingual, so a lot of stuff doesn't occur to me, like it does to people that learned a language from scratch. While I can speak the languages instinctively, I actually don't know much about grammar... and surely not as much as a professional translator.
So thanks again, that was very helpful. I will know digest the information.

John Steadfast wrote:Hi,

I'm looking for a Japanese native fluent in English (translator) with a passion for Biology & Natural farming. I have recently bought a Japanese book, that I would like to have translated with love and dedication.
I can do a google translation myself, but would like to have it done right. Hope someone here can help.

I could possibly help you. I've done some translating Japanese to English and proofreading on the side. I got my masters in science from a Japanese university and am familiar with biology and agriculture terminology.

As others mentioned, I would much prefer a digital copy to work with, or Google's first try. Although Google is still hit or miss between Japanese and English; sometimes it still doesn't make any sense...

Can I ask what is the book called?

My cousin is an English/Japanese translator/teacher born in the US, and had been living in Japan for decades.. I don't know that he is a horticultural specialist, but if it comes down to it and you would like me to reach out to him let me know!

Fae

Thank you, but I already received an amazing offer. Sadly, the cost of the translation would still be too much for the moment.

The book is called „The theory of new cultivation technology“ by Oinoue Yasusi. He was one of Dr Cho's teachers.

In Dr Cho's Natural Farming he is wrongly translated as Oino Ueyas.

Are you able to post an image of the author's name as it appears on the book? This will make it a lot easier to search for and remove the ambiguity caused by romanization. A simple picture from your cell phone camera would be sufficient.

An Oinoue Yasushi published research on grape cultivation in the late 30s if that fits with your book publication date.

Wikipedia shows 大井上 康 as one of Cho Han-kyu's teachers. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Korean_natural_farming, and searching that name I found a biography and a bunch of other stuff.

I find it odd that every reference to the book uses the same exact word order, which in English translated from JP is unusual enough to make me wonder if the translation is out there somewhere. But I did not take the time to do a serious search, just a quickie trawl. Might be worth a more serious look.

Yes, this book explains the plant nutritive cycle in depth. Clearly, there aren't enough people interested in the book to republish it, but to me it is an amazing treasure.

John Steadfast wrote:Thank you, but I already received an amazing offer. Sadly, the cost of the translation would still be too much for the moment.

The book is called „The theory of new cultivation technology“ by Oinoue Yasusi. He was one of Dr Cho's teachers.

In Dr Cho's Natural Farming he is wrongly translated as Oino Ueyas.

That sounds really interesting! I'm into books like that.

I know a book translator, she's my friend and writing practice buddy.

She's a native Japanese, and her English is very good, though Canadian rather than American.

I can give her your contact info if you like. But she's not cheap, she's a proper translator of books. She worked closely with a native English speaker to proofread. So you probably either have to do that part yourself or pay her choice of proofreader as well.

I'm a native English speaker with N3 Japanese ability and beginners understanding of Mandarin and Spanish.

Kanji is of course the issue in Japanese... I  can read manga and newspaper entries, but it's pretty hard to get anything at a college grads level. I need books to not be too technical.