---------------------------------------------------------------------- FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS Honyaku Mailing List Version 0.4 July 26, 1994 ______________________________________________________________________ CONTENTS ______________________________________________________________________ 1.0 What is the Honyaku mailing list? 1.1 How do I subscribe? 1.2 How do I post messages? 1.3 How do I unsubscribe? 1.4 How do I get other information about the list? 1.5 Is there a Honyaku archive? 1.6 Is there a preferred format for Honyaku posts? 2.0 How can I read and write Japanese on this list? 3.0 What other resources are available for J/E translators? 3.1 What is JAT? 3.2 What are some other translators' organizations? 3.3 What is FORUM? 3.4 What information is available on the Internet? 4.0 Who are the subscribers? ______________________________________________________________________ 1.0 What is the Honyaku mailing list? ______________________________________________________________________ "Two heads are better than one," the saying goes, or, in Japanese, "sannin yoreba monju no chie." If you are a translator and have become stuck over how to handle a particular phrase, ask your question here. Other questions or discussions related to translation are welcome. Then be amazed at what you can learn from the collective mind. You don't have to be a professional translator to participate in the list. Everyone with an interest in the English and Japanese languages and in establishing connections between them is welcome. This is an open mailing list administered by the Japan Association of Translators (JAT). It was established in March 1994 by Dan Kanagy (dkanagy@twics.com), who now administers it. There are over one hundred fifty subscribers at present. ________________________ 1.1 How do I subscribe? ________________________ To subscribe to the Honyaku mailing list, send an e-mail message to: listserv@netcom.com The complete body of the message (not the subject line) should be: subscribe honyaku Do not put your name after "subscribe honyaku." Soon after you subscribe, you will receive a message with general introductory information about the mailing list. To get the latest version of this message, follow the instructions given in Section 1.4 below. ____________________________ 1.2 How do I post messages? ____________________________ When you are subscribed to the list, you can post your own messages for distribution to everyone else. Send your post to: honyaku@netcom.com Each message is distributed separately with its own lengthy e-mail header, so contributors to the Honyaku discussion often include several items in a single message. It's also a good idea to include your name at the beginning or end of your messages, because some systems garble or omit the sender's name. More suggestions about formatting posts appear in Section 1.6 below. __________________________ 1.3 How do I unsubscribe? __________________________ To unsubscribe, send an e-mail message to: listserv@netcom.com The body of the message should be: unsubscribe honyaku This will unsubscribe the account from which you send the message. If you are subscribed with some other address, you'll have to send a command of the following form instead: unsubscribe honyaku other-address@your_site.your_net If you don't know what address you are subscribed with, use the "who honyaku" command described in the next section. ___________________________________________________ 1.4 How do I get other information about the list? ___________________________________________________ Information about the list can be retrieved automatically by sending a command in the body of an e-mail message to: listserv@netcom.com To get a list of current subscribers, send the following command: who honyaku To get the most recent version of the general introductory information about Honyaku, send: info honyaku To get a list of other commands, send: help If you have any questions or comments about the list, send them to honyaku-owner@netcom.com ________________________________ 1.5 Is there a Honyaku archive? ________________________________ 1.5.1 FTP Site Dan Kanagy has set up an archive at Netcom that contains information of interest. The latest version of this FAQ and the Honyaku directory are stored there. In the future, back files of Honyaku discussions are likely to be kept there as well. If you have ftp access, you can reach this archive by connecting to ftp.netcom.com and following the usual procedure for anonymous ftp (type "login anonymous" at the SERVER.NETCOM.COM> prompt and give your e-mail address as your password). Then type "cd pub/honyaku" to reach the honyaku directory, "ls" to see a list of the contents of that directory, and "get file.name" to download something in that directory to your home system. To make a file available to Honyaku subscribers, here's what you do. Log on to ftp.netcom.com as described above, but this time enter "cd pub/honyaku/put" to get to the upload directory. Then enter "put file.name" and your file will be on its way. Then send e-mail to Dan Kanagy (dkanagy@netcom.com) to let him know what you've done. Or you can announce to the mailing list the name of the file you made available. 1.5.2 FTP by E-mail If you do not have ftp access, you can retrieve files from the Honyaku archive be e-mail. To get a list of available files, send e-mail to ftp-request@netcom.com with the body of: ls honyaku Or you can send dir honyaku instead to get a longer listing of one file per line. To fetch a file of interest, send e-mail to the same address with the body of: send honyaku/file.name You can use this command to get either text or binary files of any length. Longer files will be split into separate e-mail, which you will have to reassemble yourself. Binary files will be uunecoded, which you will have to unencode yourself. If you send e-mail with the body of index honyaku you will receive the index file. For a complete list of ftp-by-email commands, send the following message: help 1.5.3 WorldWideWeb Home Page Adam Rice has established the Honyaku Home Page for the WWW. It includes links to other sites of interest. If you have access to Lynx, Mosaic, or another WWW browser on the Internet, point to the following address: http://www.realtime.net/~adamrice/ Be sure to insert that ~ (tilde), or it won't work right. ___________________________________________________ 1.6 Is there a preferred format for Honyaku posts? ___________________________________________________ Some suggestions that have been made are as follows: * Be sure to use only ASCII characters in your posts. The ASCII character list does not include characters with diacritics or left and right quotation marks. If you are using a word processor with "smart" quotation marks, turn off this feature when writing posts. * Keeping the maximum length of lines to about 72 characters will make your posts easier to read and easier to quote from. * The maximum permitted length of a single Honyaku post is about five kilobytes; anything longer will get bounced to Dan Kanagy for approval. Approval will always be given when the note pertains to ongoing discussion. However, long notes forwarded from newsgroups that don't pertain to ongoing discussion are unlikely to be approved. * Use the subject line to indicate the content of your post. Many people have started using the symbols [Q] for question, [A] for answer, and [C] for comment, followed by a word or two specifying the topic of the post. * Be sure to include your name and e-mail address at the end of your post. This is especially important for people on NiftyServe, because no one else will be able to read your Japanese header. And some systems, such as MCI Mail, strip the headers from the message; if you don't include your name in the body of your message, people on those systems will not know who was writing. * When posting a reply to a question, include a short synopsis or quotation of the original question. (Many people mark quotations with > or | symbols in the left margin.) Translators are frequently busy with rush jobs which prevent them from reading Honyaku mail every day. The busiest are often the veterans whose replies add greatest value to the discussions on the list. Synopses make it easier for everyone to contribute more easily. * While sometimes a reply is best sent privately, in most cases replies should be posted publicly to the list so that everyone can see the responses and contribute to the synergy of the list. * The etiquette of the Honyaku list is slightly more Japanese than other Internet discussion groups. Questers frequently post thank-you notes after their queries have been answered. Since most of the questions regard the correct English translations of Japanese words, the thank-you note is a useful place to give a synopsis of what you have learned. For instance, if your field is not electrical engineering, you might ignore the discussion on *atchaku tanshi* until the subject "Thanks for atchaku tanshi" appears, where a synopsis useful to save and archive appears. * A wide variety of romanization systems is used by correspondents to the Honyaku list. These systems tend to reflect the needs of data entry via FEPs (front end processors) rather than academic theories about Japanese phonology. Previous discussion of this subject suggests that a unified romanization system will emerge as a result of software developments (FEPs and database exchange protocols) rather than as a result of discussion on the Honyaku list. However, note that "hats on vowels" will turn into garbage on the Internet. You must use one of the "wa-puro" conventions of doubling long Katakana vowels (or using a dash) and adding "u" to long Hiragana vowels as in *jouhou shori* (information processing). ______________________________________________________________________ 2.0 How can I read and write Japanese on this list? ______________________________________________________________________ The primary language of the Honyaku mailing list is English, but the topic of discussion is often the Japanese language, so people naturally include Japanese words, phrases, and sentences as well. There are many systems available for encoding kanji and kana in computers, including JIS, Shift-JIS, and EUC. The primary encoding method for Internet e-mail is JIS, which uses 7-bit characters. Shift-JIS and EUC use 8-bit characters, and the 8th bit is stripped away by many e-mail processors, turning the message into garbage. Therefore all kanji should be converted into the JIS format before posting to Honyaku. Some on-line systems will do this automatically (NiftyServe, for example, converts automatically between Shift-JIS and JIS, and TWICS converts automatically between EUC and JIS), but others will require special conversion in your computer. For more information on how to do this, see Ken Lunde's book described below. If you are able to send Japanese in the JIS format, please do so. However, please keep in mind that many subscribers to this list are not kanji-capable and will not be able to display it on their computers. Therefore include the romanization of all Japanese and, when necessary, brief explanations of the kanji. A poll conducted soon after the Honyaku list began found that slightly over half of the respondents were able to read and write kanji on the list. It may eventually become possible to dispense with romaji entirely, but that is still a long way off. In fact, the proportion of posts containing encoded Japanese has been dropping recently. For those interested in learning more about how the Japanese language is handled by computers, the standard reference is "Understanding Japanese Information Processing" by Ken Lunde (O'Reilly & Associates, Inc., 1993; ISBN 1-56592-043-0). The book is very clearly written and easy to understand. ______________________________________________________________________ 3.0 What other resources are available for J/E translators? ______________________________________________________________________ _________________ 3.1 What is JAT? _________________ The Japan Association of Translators (JAT) was founded in 1985 in the belief that translators can benefit from supportive exchanges of experiences, insights, and expertise. Since its inception, JAT has held monthly meetings and issued a monthly Bulletin. JAT's meetings, which are free and open to the public, have focused on both the translation process and the translation business, with members explaining the problems they encounter and how they approach solving these issues. The group has also invited outside speakers and tried to avail itself of all available resources. Articles in the Bulletin have a broad range, not only reporting on the meetings but including numerous other discussions of translation-related issues. Since 1991, JAT has also sponsored an electronic forum for the discussion of translation issues on TWICS, a forum open to everyone with an interest in translation whether JAT member or not. With the growth of commercial Internet access in Japan, this topic was retired and replaced by the HONYAKU mailing list in March 1994. An additional activity of JAT has been sponsoring and/or organizing the International Japanese/English Translation Conference. The first conference took place in Hakone, Japan, in 1990. Subsequent IJET Conferences were held in San Francisco (U.S.) in 1991, Fuji Yoshida (Japan) in 1992, Brisbane (Australia) in 1993, and Chiba (Japan) in 1994. The 1995 conference is scheduled for Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. JAT members number about 160. Most live in Japan, but others also reside in Canada, the United States, Australia, and the United Kingdom. Membership in JAT is limited to individuals with an interest in translation. This means that the organization is not dominated by agencies or end users interested in cartelizing the market but by working translators interested in honing their skills. JAT's intention is to serve the interests of individual translators. Should you be interested in joining JAT, you can send e-mail to John Burton (selwyn@twics.com), JAT's membership secretary, to ask for an application form. One year's membership (12 months from the month of joining) is 10,000 yen. In addition, a 3,000 yen processing fee is charged for new membership applications. ____________________________________________________ 3.2 What are some other translators' organizations? ____________________________________________________ ___________________ 3.3 What is FORUM? ___________________ FORUM is a quarterly newsletter for translators and interpreters of Japanese. It started out five years ago as something for students and graduates of the Master's course in Japanese interpreting and translating at the University of Queensland in Australia, but has since grown to have a much wider readership of nearly 300 (including about 80 overseas readers). It contains a variety of articles in English and Japanese about matters of interest to people working in this profession, and usually each issue includes a glossary on a particular subject area. Perhaps the best thing about FORUM is that it is provided free of charge as a community service. FORUM is edited by Judy Wakabayashi and published by the Key Centre for Asian Languages and Studies, which hosted IJET-4 in Brisbane in 1993. If you wish to receive FORUM, drop a note to the Key Centre for Asian Languages and Studies, University of Queensland, QLD 4072, Australia (fax: +61 7 365 6811). Contributions from readers are always welcome. ___________________________________________________ 3.4 What information is available on the Internet? ___________________________________________________ The Honyaku Home Page described in section 1.5.3 above contains links to many sites of interest. A long FAQ prepared for the sci.lang.japan Usenet group contains a lot of information about Japanese-language-related resources on the Internet. It can be retrieved by ftp from: ftp.uwtc.washington.edu pub/Japanese/FAQ.sci.lang.japan.v4.93 This site also includes other files related to Japanese. Some Usenet groups of interest are: sci.lang.japan soc.culture.japan comp.research.japan alt.japanese.text Ken Lunde has placed the Honyaku FAQ at FTP site ftp.ora.com. ______________________________________________________________________ 4.0 Who are the subscribers? ______________________________________________________________________ The Honyaku Directory contains information submitted by Honyaku subscribers about themselves. This directory, titled "dir0.4", is available from the Honyaku ftp site described in section 1.5 above. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- End of FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS, Honyaku Mailing List, Version 0.4, July 26, 1994. Please send all correspondence regarding this FAQ to Tom Gally (tomgally@twics.com). ----------------------------------------------------------------------