Translation Practise (SHORT!) Comments & Questions

[PaulTB]

OK I've learned my lesson - nobody's going to read and comment on an entire translated article.

So this thread is for short bits I have questions on taken from the main thread.

(Apart from my specific questions any general comments / corrections welcome).

メディアに関わっていると目され、実名でブログを持つ方がここ１、２ヶ月の間に続出している。
This journalist, in the spotlight for for his media involvement, wrote a blog under his real name for about a couple of months.

Is 方 a _single_ specific person here?

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雑誌が主な舞台らしい方で複数人でブログを持つ例もあり、私が見た名前の数だけで20を超える。
There are a fair few people with blogs written by multiple people in a mainly magazine like setting, I know of more than 20 such myself.

The bit around "mainly magazine like setting" I'm particularly uncertain of.

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雑誌がもし編集部公認でブログを出せるなら、アンテナショップを出す感覚で大胆にネット上の反応を見るといった試みがあってもよいが、コンテンツを持ち出すのに迷いがある。
It would be great if there were examples of magazines putting out blogs with approval of the editorial department like putting out an 'antenna shop'*1 to see the reaction on the net but they usually waver what to include.

The bit around アンテナショップを出す感覚で大胆にネット上の反応を見るといった試みがあってもよい I'm uncertain of.

Is there a better way to translate コンテンツを持ち出すのに迷いがある ?

*1 shops that specialise in trial goods and experimental lines.

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Right that's ony four questions - hopefully not too much to scare people off.

 

[bentenmusume]

Okay, let me take a shot at this.

メディアに関わっていると目され、実名でブログを持つ方がここ１、２ヶ月の間に続出している。
This journalist, in the spotlight for for his media involvement, wrote a blog under his real name for about a couple of months.

Is 方 a _single_ specific person here?

Highly unlikely, especially given that your final predicate is 続出する, which describes a similar event/happening that occurs repeatedly. Also, I think "in the spotlight" might be a bit too strong of an interpretation -- I'd go with simply "seen as", or something along those lines. But your biggest problem here is that 「メディアに関わっていると目され、実名でブログを持つ」 is a giant relative clause that's modifying 「方」, which in turn is the subject of 「続出している」, something that seems to get lost in your translation.

Try something like "Individuals who are recognized members of the media and also run blogs under their real names have been popping up one after another over the past one or two months."

雑誌が主な舞台らしい方で複数人でブログを持つ例もあり、私が見た名前の数だけで20を超える。There are a fair few people with blogs written by multiple people in a mainly magazine like setting, I know of more than 20 such myself.

The bit around "mainly magazine like setting" I'm particularly uncertain of.

You're confusing another relative clause here. 「雑誌が主な舞台らしい」 is modifying 「方」, meaning "people for whom it appears that magazines are their main 'stage'".

"One also finds examples of blogs run by multiple individuals who mainly are active on the magazine scene. I've seen more than twenty such names myself." would probably work.

雑誌がもし編集部公認でブログを出せるなら、アンテナショップを出す感覚で大胆にネット上の反応を見るといった試みがあってもよいが、コンテンツを持ち出すのに迷いがある。
It would be great if there were examples of magazines putting out blogs with approval of the editorial department like putting out an 'antenna shop'*1 to see the reaction on the net but they usually waver what to include.

The bit around アンテナショップを出す感覚で大胆にネット上の反応を見るといった試みがあってもよい I'm uncertain of.

"It would be great" sounds a little too enthusiastic to me.

"If a magazine is able to put out a blog with the approval of their editorial department, it's fine to do so as an attempt to gauge reaction on the net -- in the same sense of a store opening an 'antenna shop' -- but there is some hesitation to put the contents of their publication up on the net.

*1 shops that specialise in trial goods and experimental lines.

I think you're missing the most important nuance of this expression (and I'm not sure where you got "experimental lines" from.) Go back and look at the dictionary entry one more time. The "antenna shop" is a shop opened for the specific purpose of selling new products in order to gauge consumer reaction to them.

I'm assuming that there's some business-world jargon for this some concept in English as well, but I wouldn't have the slightest clue what it would be. This is why I'm not a professional translator, I guess.

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I'm not particularly confident in the smoothness of my English translations (I wrote them kind of quickly), but I feel relatively certain about my interpretation(s) of the original text. Hopefully this will help clear up any confusing points. (If I've made any mistakes of my own, I'm hoping that epigeneさん or any of the other more experienced people here will jump in to correct me.)

 

[PaulTB]

Thank you very much. You can assume that anything I haven't commented on I agree with and am inwardly digesting.

I realised that I'd had a hard time of it ... but I didn't realise just how hard.

You're confusing another relative clause here. 「雑誌が主な舞台らしい」 is modifying 「方」, meaning "people for whom it appears that magazines are their main 'stage'".

I did realise which was modifying what there - but I didn't interpret it correctly anyway.

I think you're missing the most important nuance of this expression (and I'm not sure where you got "experimental lines" from.) Go back and look at the dictionary entry one more time. The "antenna shop" is a shop opened for the specific purpose of selling new products in order to gauge consumer reaction to them.

That's pretty much what an experimental line is. It's a new product line that is being sold on a trial basis to see how it does. It doesn't have to mean the product _itself_ is experimental. However it appears that term isn't used as often as I thought it was.

 

[epigene]

Hi Paul!

jt_san's got everything right. Sorry, I didn't post in your translation thread--I suffer from lack of time. I don't want my husband/boss catching me posting in this forum & my low vision makes reading long posts time-consuming.

This is just a note about the use of 窶｢ﾃｻ.
The writer uses this form and not ﾂ人 or some other reference by profession, position, etc., as in a "real" published newspaper article (i.e., strictly objective reference to the parties involved) because he wants to express courtesy to these people, consciously aware that they may be reading his blog.ﾂ Probably this is the reason for your misunderstanding.

 

[PaulTB]

Hi Paul!

jt_san's got everything right. Sorry, I didn't post in your translation thread--I suffer from lack of time. I don't want my husband/boss catching me posting in this forum & my low vision makes reading long posts time-consuming.

This is just a note about the use of 方.
The writer uses this form and not 人 or some other reference by profession, position, etc., as in a "real" published newspaper article (i.e., strictly objective reference to the parties involved) because he wants to express courtesy to these people, consciously aware that they may be reading his blog. Probably this is the reason for your misunderstanding.

 

[bentenmusume]

Well for the 雑誌が主な舞台らしい方 bit I just don't see what having magazines as "their main 'stage'" means - in Japanese or English.

I don't think the 直訳 works here in English. The idea is that while these people might also be writing for blogs, the main venue for their writing is in magazines -- that's probably where they started out and where they make their living, in the same way that you might have an actor who has appeared in some movies but is primarily known as a stage actor (or vice versa).

Also:

That's pretty much what an experimental line is. It's a new product line that is being sold on a trial basis to see how it does. It doesn't have to mean the product _itself_ is experimental. However it appears that term isn't used as often as I thought it was.

Sorry, I think I had a bit of a brain freeze here -- I wasn't sure what sort of "lines" you were talking about, but an experimental product line makes good enough sense to me. It's not a term that I've previously heard or used, but that doesn't really mean much, as my knowledge of business jargon is severely limited at best.

 

[PaulTB]

I don't think the 直訳 works here in English. The idea is that while these people might also be writing for blogs, the main venue for their writing is in magazines -- that's probably where they started out and where they make their living, in the same way that you might have an actor who has appeared in some movies but is primarily known as a stage actor (or vice versa).

Yeah I was thinking something like 'stage' = 'setting of blog' not 'stage' = 'field of work' hence 'people with magazine-blogs' instead of 'people working in magazines with blogs'.

 

[bentenmusume]

Yeah I was thinking something like 'stage' = 'setting of blog' not 'stage' = 'field of work' hence 'people with magazine-blogs' instead of 'people working in magazines with blogs'.

Hmm, okay... I can kind of see where the confusion might have come from, but leaving aside the range of nuance that the word 舞台 might have, the fact that 雑誌が主な舞台らしい is modifying 方 and not ブログ leads me to really only one natural interpretation -- that is, no matter how I parse the sentence, I can't really come up with a way to interpret "butai" as the "setting" or "stage" of the blogs themselves.

 

[epigene]

Sorry, I'm not reading all the posts. I'll just comment on the phrase discussed in jt-san's post.

The original Japanese sentence itself is problematic in terms of clarity (no offense to Dando-san, there are similar problems in many published articles).

What he means is that there are cases of blogs being written each by a multiple number of persons, who presumably are active in magazine journalism. (I hope that's what the writer meant. )