TranNet デイリー読売　


		THE DAILY YOMIURI


		＜＜2/7付デイリーヨミウリ『Saturday SCENE』掲載記事の一部抜粋です。＞＞ By Tom Baker Daily Yomiuri Staff Writer 　A hopeful newcomer to the field is Chiga Kamei, who recently got her start in young adult fiction. After doing a little rough-draft translation work behind the scenes, Kamei recently came out with her first book translation under her own name --- A Taste of Perfection, by Canadian author Laura Langston. Kamei's auditions pay off 　"I have been a member of TranNet for about three years, and last year, luckily, I passed two auditions," says Kamei, 52, who once taught piano but now works at her husband's acounting office. 　TranNet is a translation agency in Shinjuku Ward, Tokyo, that matches aspiring translators with assignments from publishers. 　TranNet Sales Manager Koji Chikatani says his firm has contacts with dozens of publishers and has thousands of translators registered. When a publisher requests a translation of a certain book, TranNet puts out a call for auditions, inviting its members to translate a sample of the text. The firm then presents the top five candidates to the publisher. The publisher pays TranNet, which in turn pays the translator. 　Most of the books TranNet handies are nonfiction --- everything from medical textbooks to Lonely Planet travel guides. "Fiction is much harder to translate," Chikatani notes. 　Still, fiction is where Kamei has begun to make her mark. After successfully completing a firstdraft translation of a portion of one young adult novel, she was assigned to do another entirely on her own. A Taste of Perfection is a book Kamei says she feels strongly about: "Reading this book, I cried and burst into laughter. And I wanted to express that feeling in Japanese." 　Not that it was easy. She ran into the same challenges that beset even the veterans. Like Nagai, she puzzled over brand names --- Lip Smackers, for example --- and like Kurohara, she found that exact word-for-word translations don't really work --- especially when one is confronted with preteen girlspeak such as, "Talk about majorly ugly!" Kamei even found she had to ponder the nuances of gesture as well as language: What does it mean, for example, when a character bites her lip? 　Erin, the book's 12-year-old protagonist, considers herself a warty, hairy-legged ugly duckling. But when her dog-breeder grandmother asks her to take a beautiful champion labrador to a show, Erin decides to get a complete makeover for the occasion. The girl and the dog look perfect together, but then tragedy strikes. Learning from what happens helps Erin grow up. 　Not only did Kamei like the story, but she enjoys the translating work itself. "I'm very pleased when I find the right word, the right phrase," she says, likening it to the satisfaction of finding a jigsaw puzzle piece that fits just right to complete the picture. 　Of course, Kamei's "right word" is a Japanese one. As Chikatani points out, successful English-to-Japanese translators have to be professional-level writers in Japanese to make their work worth reading. 　Asked what advice he would offer aspiring translators. "It is more important to write good Japanese than to understand English well," he says. "So read many books, Japanese books."

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