Interpreters & Translators: Top Ten Wanted

[J. M. Hall]

We all guage the potential benefits that poorly rewarded translation can
bring us.  The recent Yamagata Festival, for example, would not be possible
without the work of many translators working for a half or a third of what
they could get elsewhere.  Still, the interesting material, the potential
of the Festival itself, and the free film pass offered all warrant that
work.  What would happen to festivals like Yamagata if there were not
enough graduate-student types--not at all financially stable, but still not
committed to translation as a means of making a living?  That said,
translators--especially the liminal graduate-student-types like
myself--need to remind their often well-meaning employers of market
conditions.  While a labor standard is sadly laughable, I think it
important to insist on fair pay and fair time.

The real problem lies in how Festivals imagine the translation process and
funding.  As an example, I was asked to translate the Nippon Cinema Now
catalogue currently being passed out to potential distributors at the 1999
Tokyo International Film Festival.  Despite my willingness to do it at a
reasonable rate in a reasonable amount of time, the organizers seemed to
have only enough funds to hire someone with no sense of the value of
his/her own time who could spit out the translation in days. In the end,
the translation work was sent back to the film producers--who produced
various qualities of prose, some truly horrendous and none terribly strong.
 The result is the current 40 pp pamphlet which, I beleive, is a real
embarassment to Japanese film marketing efforts.  New Cinema from Japan/
Nippon Cinema Now need to be reminded what it takes to produce decent
quality work.   So too might Kaya Publishing.

In 1997, I was involved with a local (Tokyo-based) lesbian and gay activist
organization's guest editorship of an issue of Gendai shiso, organized
around the translation of significant US and European gay and lesbian
theory overlooked by the queer theory boom in Japan.  Each of the
translator's was asked to add a commentary, offering her/his opinion of the
essay, his/her interaction with it, or her/his motivitation behind
accepting the economically thankless task of translating.  I fonnd these
short afterwords very interesting, and thought this idea of plural
authorship around a translated piece to be an important political strategy.
 The question then becomes how many/ what kind of voices the authors of the
texts mentioned recently can imagine in their monographs.

I think Professor Fowler's consumer caveat --you get what you pay for -- is
to the mark.  But from the labor-side of the equation, one should add -- 
don't be gotten by what you're paid for.

Jonathan Hall

_________________________
"In fact, the whole of Japan is a pure invention.  There is no such
country.  There are no such people."  -- Oscar Wilde