No time to write much today, so check out this site a workmate showed me earlier: DictJuggler.net, put together by "Yoichi Yamaoka and his successors, Naoshi Fujimoto, gaia-translators, and Marlin Arms Corporation." The array of dictionary and similar searches is impressive, but what's really interesting is the 翻訳訳語辞典, a dictionary of how various words have been translated in a range of real translations. ...

Today I present another tale of Man'yōshū editing derring-do, this time featuring poem #1....

Academics standing up publicly to Elsevier! This is very exciting. Thanks, Tim Gowers! Thanks, everyone else who has been working for open access for quite some time now!...

A haiku by Akutagawa Ryunosuke 芥川竜之介, 1919:...

A couple of weeks ago, in the course of translating Kokin shū poem #189, L.N. Hammer noted that itsu wa to wa toki wa wakanedo ("Even though we can [feel this way] at any time", in his translation) is, as constructions go, hard to get your head around....

Pronoun abuse is a common failing of Indo-Europophones in the early stages of learning Japanese. Japanese is a pro-drop language; you gotta drop your (pragmatically inferable) pros. On the other hand, because Japanese pronouns are also tied into the honorific speech system, they have uses beyond simply pinch-hitting for antecedents, and this is where it gets interesting....