Clik here to view.
On Rewriting While Translating
From Edo Culture: Daily Life and Diversions in Urban Japan, 1600–1868, by Nishiyama Matsunosuke, trans. and ed. by Gerald Groemer (U. Hawai‘i Press, 1997), pp. 3-4: In translating I have striven to...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Interpreting Sino-Soviet Border Clashes, 1969
From: The Man on Whom Nothing Was Lost: The Grand Strategy of Charles Hill, by Molly Worthen (Mariner Books, 2007), Kindle Loc. 1202-26: It remained unclear whether Beijing was simply using the Soviet...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Legacies of Hepburn’s First Dictionary of Japanese, 1867
From: American Missionaries, Christian Oyatoi, and Japan 1859–73, by Hamish Ion (UBC Press, 2009), pp. 80-81: [In 1866] Hepburn‘s dictionary was being printed at a rate of 6 pages a day, with nearly...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Naipaul on Schweitzer in Gabon
From The Masque of Africa: Glimpses of African Belief, by V. S. Naipaul (Knopf, 2010), pp. 203-205: Dr. Schweitzer came out to Gabon in 1915. The French colony had been established more than sixty...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Two Kinds of ‘Missing’ Stats in Japanese News Reports
When natural disasters hit in Japan, it is customary to report the number of people killed, injured, and/or missing. For smaller-scale disasters, the word for ‘missing’ is usually 行方不明 yukue fumei...
View ArticleClik here to view.
NGOs Drive Negative Reporting
The March/April 2011 issue of Columbia Journalism Review has a long-overdue article by former Peace Corps volunteer Karen Rothmyer under the provocative headline, Hiding the Real Africa: Why NGOs...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Scope of the Great War of Africa, 1996–?
From Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa, by Jason Stearns (Public Affairs, 2011), Kindle Loc. 130-146: The Democratic Republic of the Congo is a...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Kasika, 1998: Congo’s Srebrenica the World Ignored?
From Dancing in the Glory of Monsters: The Collapse of the Congo and the Great War of Africa, by Jason Stearns (Public Affairs, 2011), Kindle Loc. 4335-4367 (pp. 250-251): So how did Congolese...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Effects of the Papal Visit to Cuba in 1998
From Looking for History: Dispatches from Latin America, by Alma Guillermoprieto (Vintage, 2001), pp. 97-99: The issue of Granma I acquire from a vendor in front of the cathedral is eight pages thick,...
View ArticleClik here to view.
Language Documentation Hiatus
My slow and erratic progress on documenting Numbami, the language I did fieldwork on in Papua New Guinea in 1976, suddenly gained traction on October 1, when I imported my old Numbami dictionary file...
View Article
