Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps, down new roads, armed with nothing but their own vision.
Ayn Rand
 lmost
a quarter of a century ago, I returned from Tokyo to San Francisco,
looking for a job. I had been living in San Francisco from 1982 to
1985, then moved in 1985 with my new wife to Tokyo (the US immigration
laws required her to wait for an immigrant visa in her home country).
Although I could have stayed in Japan longer—I had a job there as an
in-house translator for a small Japanese import company—I realized that
Japan would never really feel like home to me the way California did to
this immigrant from Central Europe. It was not very hard to find a job
in San Francisco right away, as long as I did not mind a low pay. I
worked for a few months for another Japanese import company, this time
in South San Francisco, then a few months for a Japanese travel agency,
but I was bored and really unhappy with my work. I needed something
that would be more challenging and that would at the same time pay more
money.
Compared to the situation 25 years ago, some things have changed for better, some for worse, and some remain the same. It
was at this point that I met Donald Philippi. As fate would have it, he
also lived in the Richmond district of San Francisco, not far from
Golden Gate Park, only a few blocks away. Don (who preferred to be
called Slava because he somehow remembered that in his previous
incarnation he was a Russian named Slava Ranko, which is why he learned
Russian, or so he said), was one of the first pioneers of technical
translation from Japanese to English. When he lived in Japan in the
sixties and seventies studying Japanese and Ainu languages (Ainu is the
name of the original inhabitants of Japan who are now virtually
extinct), he figured out early on that it is much easier to make a
living translating technical manuals and specifications from Japanese
to English for companies such as Hitachi and Fujitsu, than, say,
compiling an Ainu-English dictionary. Technical Japanese was at that
time translated into English almost exclusively by native Japanese
speakers who had a technical background but no linguistic background
and whose fluency in English was sometime not very good. After his
return from Japan to US in the early seventies, Don (or Slava) set up
his shop in a house he bought for money obtained from his translating
work in Japan and wisely invested in the purchase of a small house in
Tokyo, on 10 th Avenue in San Francisco where he turned 4
bedrooms on second floor into a single room which served as a
translator's office and started cranking out technical translation from
Japanese again, what else, on an IBM typewriter. More information about
Don's life, including his obituary and 3 interviews conducted with him
in this period by Fred Schodt, is available on Fred Shodt's website
here: http://www.jai2.com/dlp.htm. In 1983 Don started publishing his newsletter called Technical Japanese Translation,
which was mailed to people who were interested in the subject and
somehow ended up on his mailing list. In its second year of publishing
(1984), Don described the newsletter as follows: "This is the only
newsletter published anywhere in the world by and for our far-flung and
obscure community of Japanese technical translators. It is a completely
grassroots endeavor with no subsidies or support except that given by
its readers. It is now going into its second year and has more than 150
readers on three continents". In fact, it was not unlike an early
version of publications such as the Translation Journal, with emphasis on Japanese technical translation, before the age of Internet.
I did not know Don at that time, and I did not find out about the
newsletter until a few years later when the newsletter was no longer in
existence. But thanks to the magic of the Internet, an archived form of
the newsletter lives on, this time on the following URL of the website
of Waseda University: http://www.f.waseda.jp/buda/tjt/tjt-idx.html. It is interesting to read about the different topics discussed in the issues of Technical Japanese Translation
over a period of about 2 years some 25 years ago. The topics discussed
by technical translators back then and now have not really changed that
much: technology (which now means mostly computers and Internet, but
back in the prehistoric eighties meant mostly extremely expensive,
stand-alone Japanese word processors—basically typewriters with a tiny
LCD display plus a printer—new books published about Japan in English
and about America in Japanese, the viability of machine translation and
the perceived threat that MT could become one day to human translators
if it ever could work (the conclusion in Technical Japanese Translation
back then was that it would never really work; today most people think
it will), various databases available to translators, such as databases
of chemicals, plants and species, and other scientific and technical
databases in existence some 15 years before there was Google), rates
for various types of technical translation paid back then by agencies
and direct customers in US, England, Japan, and Australia (they did not
really go up that much, taking into account inflation, they probably
went down in some cases), new words in Japanese, the apparent "threat"
to US technology represented by Japanese technology and many other
subjects.
The End of a Newsletter
Towards the end of 1984, Don published and mailed out the last issue of Technical Japanese Translation.
It must have been a lot of work putting the newsletter together—a lot
of fun too, I am sure, but I can't even begin to imagine how hard one
person would have to work to keep publishing this material back in the
prehistoric times before the Internet. Partly as a result of the
newsletter, translators who lived in the San Francisco Bay Area become
aware of each other and soon after the demise of the Technical Japanese Translation,
Don started holding meetings in his house on issues of interest to
translators, mostly dealing with technical translation from Japanese,
but not always. Because Don was a well known personality not only in
the Bay Area but also in Japan and other countries, he was able to
attract interesting people who would serve as the "main speaker" on a
whole range of subjects. Some of them came from East Coast, Pacific
Northwest, Southern California, Japan, England ... these are only the
few that I can remember. In some respects, the meetings were similar to
regular meetings of NCTA (Northern California Translators Association)
which were at that time also held in San Francisco—agency
representatives giving out business cards and collecting information,
publishers of dictionaries promoting their new products—one of the
owners of Inter Press Japan Corporation came from Japan, and Don
promptly bought all his dictionaries, including his "Sanjugomango
Daijiten" (a large technical Japanese-English dictionary with 350,000
technical terms, a major improvement in 1990 over an earlier version
from 1986 which had only 250,000 technical terms). I bought the large
dictionary myself as soon as I saved up 800 dollars. I still remember
the cost because it was so expensive. But before the advent of
Internet, we could not have survived without these dictionaries. The
meetings were a continuation of the newsletter, except that instead of
reading, translators did a lot of listening and talking to each other.
We found out who was working in what field and on what project, which
dictionaries were the best ones, and inevitably then spent a lot of
money on dictionaries in the Kinokuniya Bookstore in San Francisco's
Japan Town. People would bring some wine and food and after the speech
and discussion, the socializing part would go on for hours in Don's
study and downstairs in the kitchen. And a community of freelance
translators was born in San Francisco Bay Area—all of a sudden we saw
how many people are out there in the area, some around the corner, some
not too far from us, who did not get a steady paycheck like everybody
else and yet somehow managed to pay their bills. Back in mid eighties
and early nineties, the term "freelance translator" was not as common
as today. Work was seen basically as something that you commute to, not
as something that you do. It was difficult to convince people who drove
to work or took the morning bus to get to their offices in downtown
that we were as serious about our work as everybody else, or probably
more so. Back in those days it was very difficult for a freelance
worker to qualify for a mortgage, for example. And when you told people
that that you work at home on your computer translating patents from
Japanese, German and French to English, more often than not the result
would be an incredulous stare. It was reassuring to be able to
socialize with people who were able to make a living without any
guarantees of employment from their employer.
The End of an Era
The community of translators who used to congregate in Don's house
several times a year is no longer there. After Don passed away in 1993,
we sprinkled his ashes in Marin County near Point Reyes in the green
hills overlooking Pacific Ocean and facing Japan. We tried to continue
the tradition and met several times afterwards, but it was clear to us
that Don's untimely death was the end of an era and that there was not
much we could do about it. Some people moved to other states, some to
Japan. I moved in the summer of 2001 to Virginia where the living was
.... well, not really easy as the song goes, but definitely easier on
your wallet than in high-priced California (and where the fish are
jumping in the summer by the pier not far from my house). I wonder how
Don would have reacted to the political developments in the 16 years
since his death. Let's see, he was an anarchist when he was young, a
Republican-leaning conservative (Ayn Rand was one of his idols) in his
middle age ... my guess is that he would possibly be a liberal in his
seventies and eighties, but I don't really know. I do know that he
would really enjoy the advantages of instant access to news and
information through Internet. He used to subscribe to Nippon Keizai
Shinbun and other Japanese publications, as well as to Pravda because
he did not want to forget his Russian. He would probably be spending
many hours online these days, reading Japanese and Russian newspapers
and watching online TV in Japanese and Russian.
I myself only found out about the archived version of the Technical Japanese Translation
newsletter by accident when I was googling some obscure technical term.
I bookmarked the URL and when I have nothing to do (which may occur to
translators more in these uncertain times that we would like to), I
sometime read or reread an old issue of the newsletter. It tends to put
things into perspective. Compared to the situation 25 years ago, some
things have changed for better, some for worse, and some remain the
same. I hope that some of the readers of the Translation Journal will enjoy reading issues of an old newsletter published in San Francisco a distant quarter of a century ago as much as I do.
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