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I read through Judy Wakabayashi's advanced guide to Japanese-English translation, and I liked it a lot, as it's very practical and packed with information.
As an experienced translator, I found the problems were mainly familiar (so I decided just to read the exercises, rather than doing them properly), but not all the solutions were, and the book brought aspects of translation into clearer focus.
The book covers all kinds of different issues, so I'll just mention a few points that caught my interest as I read through.
One word I was happy to learn was “deverbalisation" for the process of thinking: "This doesn't work as a direct translation," "What does this mean?", "How do we say this in English?" - going from Japanese words to pure meaning to English words.
Just deverbalise!
Just deverbalise!
I liked this comment from Juliet Winters Carpenter on trimming away some of the excess verbiage that comes from hewing too close to the original Japanese.
The section on names had a lot that was new for me, as I don't often deal so much with the kind of issues that arise in various fictional content. And so well-organised! The book in general is good in this sense.
A paragraph on katakana as euphemism gave more food for thought.
Just scraping the surface of what's in there, but maybe it gives some idea...
The Kindle version has very occasional glitches (maybe twice) with displaying Japanese, much outweighed for me by being searchable. Otoh, the index means people with a print copy could still track down (valuable) lists of ways of translating difficult words like 充実 and 整備.
Overall, I’d firmly recommend "Japanese–English Translation: An Advanced Guide" to all J-E translators. It did seem quite pricey, but I think this kind of book is rare and basically there’s no filler.
