Translation 翻訳

I began working part-time as a Japanese-to-English translator and proofreader in 2015, and in October 2021 I quit my day job as an English teacher to go freelance.

My translating and proofreading work has been in a variety of fields, for example, business, IT, manufacturing, automotive, aviation, electronics, construction, audio, education, retail, tourism, and cuisine.

Clients have included Panasonic, Mitsubishi, Toshiba, Deloitte Thomatsu Consulting, NEC, Dentsu, Toyota, Honda, Amazon, Casio, NTT Docomo, JFE Shoji, Lenovo, Audio-Technica, Kyoto University, JR Tohoku, and the Nippon Television Network.

I have worked on contracts, promotional and marketing materials, in-house communications, advertising, web content, subtitles, examination questions, health and safety materials, menus, editorial for printed media, business and media proposals, exhibition displays, and maps and guides.

Very little of my translation work is in the public domain, but a couple of examples are the English subtitles for this episode of Toyota Times Athletes Now.

And the English text for the Swan Lake Beer website.

Other examples of my work are the Tenku Café homepage and Circuit Design transmitters/receivers.

I also have experience as a writer and have written articles in English for Panasonic Newsroom Global. For example, about energy self-sufficiency on Miyako Island and Contactless Vital Sensing for athletes.

I have been blogging about Japan for ten years and in 2020 I contributed two chapters to the anthology Inaka: Portraits of Life in Rural Japan (Camphor Press). My full-length travel book, Charinko: 2,500 Kilometres Around Japan by Bicycle, is to be published by Camphor in early 2022.

I have lived in Japan and studied Japanese for more than twelve years, passing level one of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test in 2012 and level three of the Kanji Kentei in 2018.

Before moving to Japan, I worked as a freelance TV writer and as a sound recordist for TV and film. I have also worked as an interpreter, copywriter, transcriber, and voice actor.