Good morning

It is drizzling this morning but not too bad. It may be nice after a few extremely hot days. 

On the title topic, I wanted to share my experience and have you tell us your experiences. It is about interpreters and translators. For my convenience, I call them translators. I have had to work with them fairly often and a large number of them in the past three to four years. What I had to realise was there weren't too many good ones in Tokyo. - I have worked in Tokyo thus I cannot speak for other areas but because Tokyo is the economic centre in Japan, I imagine if you want to find the best services especially this line of work, it is the place.-  

 Also there is this myth in Japan that native English speakers cannot make mistakes and must speak brilliant English. Just because people grow up in a place speaking a particular language does not make them a master of that language. I have met too many Japanese not speaking Japanese correctly nor well. They all grew up in Japan. They have no clue in terms of the Japanese styles and/or grammar. It happens to English or for that matter to any languages. That's why we practice. 

 Back to the translators, they seem to replace Japanese words with dictionary-equivalent English words and thus sentences end up meaning, God knows what. They struggle with our colloquial expressions and show little cultural competence. They love katakana jargon hence little effort put in making it understood by older Japanese folks. They have few arrows in their expression quiver. You may wonder if they are amateur. But, sadly, no, they aren't. Some of them charge $1,000 a day or more. It's not one of those in Olympics volunteer scheme. 

I started to wonder whether they have a qualification for the job. They tell me their scores of TOEIC, which I am not exactly familiar with but basically it's like IELTS General Module. I searched for the TOEIC history (https://www.iibc-global.org/english/iibc/history.html); it was founded in Japan or at least led by the Japanese in its foundation. I didn't know that. That may be why they keep telling me of that. Anyway, that is a measure of how well they speak English not a measure of how well they can translate; missing the point.

I am a little bit sceptical about their Japanese language capabilities too. I am not the person to judge here but translating requires both languages: the source and target language. As I have mentioned earlier, being raised in Japan is not a guarantee for good Japanese language skills. This may be why they have hard time putting Japanese into English. Think about it, if you don't understand well enough sentences in the source language, you cannot translate it into the target language. On top of that, if their English is just marginally good, the struggle must be even greater.

I also wonder if they learn specific techniques for translating; going back and forth between the two languages. If that training is predominantly replacing a word for word, I can sort of understand how they come up with weird sentences or strange names for a common noun.

As far as I am concerned, translators are at the top of the skill ladder in language usage, or I assumed. They may not be a linguist but they have to put linguistic theories and techniques into practice in two languages at the same time. That is some skill. But too often I have to go through the ones that are not good enough or cannot make sense or, in some cases, are crying on the job. 

Oh, and some of them were super high-handed when they see non-whites.