A quick follow-up post to mention that Adam Richards from Mutant Frog Travelogue and I together translated an article posted in August at CNET Japan by Toshinao Sasaki about the now infamous WaiWai scandal. (Read more…)

Japan Inc. was nice enough to publish an article of mine about the use of net media in Japan in this month’s issue. The main thing I wrote about in the article was the live streaming of the Akihabara knife massacre on June 8th, a topic I’ve written about before for Global Voices and also for NewAssignment.net. (Read more…)

Since I don’t see anyone writing about this anywhere else, I’m just going to jot down a few notes from this article in Japanese at r25.jp about Japan’s TV industry, which is apparently facing massive losses. (Read more…)

This post comes much much too late, so I think rather than attempt to cover what happened on day 2 of the iSummit I’ll just point to a few places that have more details. To find out about our session, I strongly recommend having a look at the article written by (fellow Canadian) Wojciech Gryc of five minutes to midnight and posted at the Summit blog. (Read more…)

It’s been a long day and I’m exceptionally bad at liveblogging, so I won’t even attempt to cover all the talks and sessions that happened today at iSummit 2008, instead I’ll just give a few thoughts and impressions. (Read more…)

I finally got around to posting an article at iCommons.org that I had meant to publish a long time ago, about an apparent conflict (in my view) between the idea of “open” content (and particularly the “open culture” movement) and the essence of linguistic “difference” which underlies the act of translation. The article is partly intended as an introduction to a session called “Open Content, Open Translation” that I am involved in organizing for the Local Context, Global Commons track at the iSummit conference, which starts in a couple days. (Read more…)

An article of mine about translation in Global Voices and Project Lingua, titled “Translation and Participatory Media: Experiences from Global Voices“, has been published online at Translation Journal. In the article I outline how translation and languages fit into the day-to-day operations of Global Voices, and also try to situate the function of translation in this context in relation to other types of translation. To my knowledge, this is the first academic paper on the crossover area between translation and participatory media, an area that I expect will become more and more important in the future. (Read more…)

I’m reading “Blog Journalism: Media for 3 million people” right now and stumbled on an interesting passage that I thought I would translate. The passage features the book’s three co-authors Yukawa Tsuruaki, Takada Masayuki and Fujishiro Hiroyuki discussing participatory journalism (Chapter 8, p. 129-130). (Read more…)

Ten years after the burst of Japan’s economic bubble, with the erosion of a common sense of values that had been shared for many years through an earlier period of strong economic growth, we face an era of confusion in which it is not even clear what we should believe in.

That’s my rough translation of the first line describing a seminar, held on March 15th by the Institute of Engineering Innovation at the University of Tokyo, entitled “Miete kita mirai” (見えてきた未来/The future that has come into view). (Read more…)

The Japanese language team at Global Voices (myself and my co-editor) were interviewed by Asahi’s new Komimi online news portal, a new site created to “introduce original articles and conversations from across the country”. Both of us are really happy with the way the article turned out in the end, so to “give a little back”, I dug up a couple things about Komimi and also, in the spirit of Global Voices, translated the article back into English. (Read more…)