How I Became a Translator

There are some people in Japan who keep insisting on to make a translator a certified qualification, like an accountant or an attorney. Luckily, they haven't succeeded in those decades, although they have issued their certificate for a "qualified translator." I am not the one, never learned translation in the collage, nor passed an examination. I once attended a course taught by a distinguished translator, but I never finished it. In my opinion, a person is a translator not because he is qualified, but he is practicing translation.
Then, people will ask me how I became a translator. A person will be a translator when he starts practicing translation. Then, how will he start? It is still a mystery to me. Some start their career as an in-house translator. I am now working with a young translator, who once worked for a trading company. After she quit her job, the company asked her to translate their documents, and she became a freelance translator. I know another woman who simply asked a translation agency to give her a job. There is a patent specialist who once worked for a patent office, which she left to marry. After several years, she started her own translation agency with the experience and connection of her previous job.
My case is much more specific and personal. It is a long story to tell. Actually, I once wrote a book on it in Japanese. I don't want to repeat it here. I will just tell you a small episode in it.

I was trying to be a translator when I was young, but didn't know how. I thought I could be, and was looking for an opportunity to come, which never came. Sometimes I was confident enough that I can do any translation job given, and sometimes I felt so frightened that I would mess up the job I would be given. I was just imagining. Nothing real happened.
When I felt so small that I will never be able to handle a proper translation job, I wondered that if I actually could endure the pressure of the work. What I didn't know about myself was, that if I could write a long script. I never wrote a document longer than a page or two. I had translated many documents as my training, but they were all short ones. I wondered if I could handle longer translation, say, hundred pages of a book. It was just my imagination I was wondering. You can laugh at, but a young unexperienced man is always afraid of imagined troubles.
One day out of this fear, I decided to translate a whole book. This way, I should be able to prove myself that I actually can translate a long document, and be confident on this. I didn't know how long it would take, but I started anyway.
I chose a book out of the shelves of a book store, just because the author's name was familiar to me. The name was Richard Brautigan, a famous poet and writer in the beat generation. I have read some of his stories in Japanese translation, and found them interesting. I knew this book I chose was not translated yet, so, there was no need to worry that I would make a cheating on myself; I had to translate it all by myself. And most of all, the book was not too long. It had just a right volume for a beginner.
I translated the book in a month or two, and became confident enough to be a translator. And that could be the end of the story. I was confident, but the job I was looking for never came. My confidence didn't help me much, because I still didn't know how to be a translator.
Several month had passed, and I was surprised one night, browsing a newspaper, to find out that Richard Brautigan, the author of the story I translated personally, was found dead in his house. Apparently, he made suicide with his gun. I felt shivered because the story I translated was on a bullet to kill a boy. I almost felt it was the same bullet that hit the author himself.
Out of my shock, I sent my script of the translation to his publisher in Japan. I didn't hope nothing. I only wanted to express my condolence to someone somehow. The only one I could think of who knew Brautigan in Japan was the publisher, and I had to send my script to prove that I had something to do with the author. It was the era long before the Internet age.
I sent them, and forgot about it. But the publisher called me. They wanted to publish my translation. Out of blue, I became a translator.

You may call me lucky. But what luck do I have if this all happened with the tragedy of a lonely poet? I was happy to be a translator, but regretted on the way it happened.
I still feel uneasy. I feel like a ghost still haunts me. Is it a ghost of the dead poet? Or the shadows of the sadness I felt in my younger days? I still don't know.
And I still don't know how to be a translator, that I am.

Editing and Translating - as an Introduction

I have been an editor/translator more than twenty years. I've never worked for a major publisher or a major magazine, but walked many back roads, done many odd jobs. Still, looking back, what I have done are either editing or translating, nothing else. I cannot call myself other than an editor or a translator, or both. For instance, I once worked for a small political party for one year. I never made a speech of propaganda, nor try to organize people. All I did was editing political paper and books on politics. After that, I worked at a health food company for two years, and what I did was translating documents and editing publication for the promotion of the company. I never sold one product.
Editing and translating, those two jobs handle Japanese words. I do not call myself a linguist, but I know much about my tools which is a language. So, I started a creative writing course on a website. It is very strange that they never teach creative writing in Japan, at least in high schools. Sure, they teach "sakubun," composition, in elementary schools and junior high schools, but it lacks all essential of how-to-write-a-good-story. They always tell you "express yourself" without giving you a hold. It is impossible. As an editor, I found many writers mess up their story just because they don't know simple theories of paragraph, sentence, and story. I always gave them advises, and their work always improved. If they know the basic of writing, my work will be much easier. That is why I started teaching. If I were not an editor, I couldn't start my class. This way, I am an editor, rather than a teacher.
I have written some essays and interviews on magazines, contributed some articles for books, and published stories on the web. But I don't call myself a writer, or a journalist. I once worked with an old journalist, a woman worked most of her life for the liberation of women in Japanese rural area. I adore her work. She once told me, "A true journalist never speaks, but let people speak." It gave me a shock. At the time, I was trying to add a "writer" to my career. She taught me that those who speaks loud, writes clever, are never be true journalists or writers. I was ashamed of what I was. I was only trying to be a famous, distinctive writer, didn't care what writers for. And when I started to think what a writer should be, I had to conclude that I was not one.
Of course, there are many things that I do in my life other than editing and translating. I am a musician playing guitar and was a climber whose records were published on magazines. But they never gave me a cash. I cook good foods, grow vegetables in my garden. But not a cook or a farmer.

I have been an editor/translator and will always be. In this series, I will write whatever an editor and a translator have seen, and will see.