The Accidental Linguist?

Thursday, 20 October 2011

Occasionally I find myself wondering how on earth I ended up being a professional translator. With a scientific educational background such as mine, a job involving languages would appear to be well down the list of likely careers.

I did manage to pass French, German and Latin at O-level (remember those?), but studied only sciences for A-levels and ended up with a degree in environmental chemistry (after a misguided attempt at geology) from University of Edinburgh.

I was all set to take up a job with British Nuclear Fuels following graduation, but an advert in the Guardian for something called the JET Programme (teaching English in Japan) caught my eye during my final year, and I applied. I was rather surprised to be granted an interview and trudged along on a pouring wet day to the Japanese Consulate in Edinburgh, wondering why they might be interested in someone like me. To be honest, I still don't know the answer to that, but I have to assume that I did OK in the interview and showed enough enthusiasm to convince them that I would be an asset to the Japanese education system.

Looking back, there was a seminal moment in my life when I realised that languages, or at least one of them, were back on the agenda. It occurred on my first night in Tokyo, when a few of us dazed, jet-lagged and goggle-eyed adventurers headed out from our hotel in search of dinner in the sweltering heat of a July evening.

We chanced upon an inexpensive restaurant serving typical Japanese fare such as stuff with noodles in soup, stuff on rice and (mostly) stuff that I didn't recognise at all. This was one of those uniquely Japanese restaurants where all the available dishes are shown in the form of plastic models in a display cabinet outside the door and, once you've decided what to order, you press the corresponding button on a ticket vending machine and hand it to the chef. At this point, you need to bear in mind that I could read no Japanese whatsoever, and it was with some surprise that a steaming bowl of beef and onions on rice appeared in front of me, just as I was hoping. It cost about £2 and it was absolutely delicious. It was slightly on the salty side, however, so I ventured back outside, stared hard at the characters "生ビール" under a plastic model of a large glass of beer for a few seconds, put my coins in the machine and handed my ticket to the chef as before. The fact that he disappeared back into the kitchen rather than pouring a beer from the tap right next to him immediately set alarm bells ringing in my head and sure enough, another plate of beef and onions was promptly placed in front of me by the chef. I'm not sure which of us looked more puzzled. This was the seminal moment I referred to earlier. It was either learn Japanese or die of thirst – summer weather in Japan makes you very thirsty.

It may seem strange to some people that such a trivial occurrence could end up being so pivotal in a person's life and career, but I remember that evening as if it were yesterday and I still allow myself a wry smile every time I eat that particular dish, which is still one of my favourites.

The Japanese transport system also played its part in my headlong rush to start grappling with an alien tongue. I was fortunate enough to be allocated a school in the lovely city of Kobe, where the local Board of Education provided me with a flat in a pleasant suburb called 鈴蘭台. Now, those 3 characters are scary enough when you're just starting to learn the language, but my suburb in question had 4 railway stations, namely 鈴蘭台, 鈴蘭台西口, 西鈴蘭台 and 北鈴蘭台 (I have omitted the English versions of these names to give you an idea of how hard it is to decipher Japanese characters and provide a more immersive blog experience). The station where I needed to alight in order not to have a long walk home was 鈴蘭台西口, but the railway line in question branched just before my station, and I think that during my first month or so, there must have been 8-10 occasions where I stood cursing on a train which (quite correctly) insisted on going up the "wrong" branch. So, in addition to not dying of thirst, not going home to the wrong town was also a very pressing reason for learning what appeared at the time to be an utterly undecipherable script.

This all occurred a "mere" 20 years ago, but take a minute to think what we have now that we didn't then. There was no internet, no satellite navigation, almost no mobile phones, let alone smart phones, and computers were not only extremely rare outside of offices, but also primitive beyond belief, even in hi-tech Japan.

More relevantly, the English education system in Japan meant that very few Japanese people (including some of those employed as English teachers) spoke anything resembling passable English. Destination boards on trains, buses and trams were in Japanese only, electronic dictionaries and phrase books didn't exist, and international phone calls were prohibitively expensive - my main means of contact with my family back home was aerogrammes.

All of these factors combined to make learning Japanese an essential activity for me - it just made life easier, whether it was getting the train to Osaka without hours of detours, ordering an interesting looking dish from a restaurant, meeting the opposite sex, understanding what was being chanted by 50,000 people at a Hanshin Tigers baseball game or explaining to a policeman why my moped was upside down in a paddy field (actually, that last one is a situation where it is far better to feign linguistic ignorance).

I suppose what I'm trying to say is that if I were 20 years younger and heading to Japan for the first time in 2011, would I have the same impetus to learn the language? Almost all trains and buses now have bilingual destination boards, even lines in isolated rural regions. I could hold my iPhone up to a Japanese menu and see instant English translations of all the dishes, the Japanese as a nation speak better English than they did 20 years ago, especially younger people, and modern mopeds handle much better. Understanding Hanshin Tigers fans would still be a tricky one though.

All in all, I suppose I should be grateful that my time in Japan was during an era when I was almost forced to learn the language - had this not been the case, it's doubtful whether I would have had this interesting and rewarding career as a translator.

The moped mentioned above - a Yamaha Jog "Stylish Sensation"