A summary of Masao Tuchiya's Keynote Lecture at the 36th Annual Conference of JSSJ(May 28, 2012)

Keynote Lecture
Reality in Translation: In Case of East of Eden (Summary)
Masao Tsuchiya
Translator
The year 2012 was the sixtieth anniversary of the publication of East of Eden (1952). In the commemorative year, the John Steinbeck Society of Japan featured East of Eden at the annual conference. We had Masao Tsuchiya, the most recent translator of East of Eden as the keynote speaker as well as a panel discussion on East of Eden.
First, Masao Tsuchiya was introduced by Yoshifumi Kato, President of the John Steinbeck Society of Japan. Mr. Tsuchiya’s translation of East of Eden (two volumes) was published by Hayakawa Publishing Corporation in 2005 as the commemorative publication of the company's 60th anniversary. Mr. Tsuchiya has translated many other works in American and British Literature, including Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day (1989) and Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway (1925).
Mr. Tsuchiya started his lecture with a quote from Steinbeck: “The profession of book-writing makes horse racing seem like a solid, stable business.” He also introduced a quote from Travels with Charley: “I’m in love with Montana.”
Mr. Tsuchiya started his translating career as a translator of technological books and documents. He worked for JETRO, IBM and so on as a technological translator. He confessed that East of Eden was the only Steinbeck work he had read.
He told us an episode that he has received an email asking about his thoughts on Kazuo Ishiguro's work from Pascal Zinck, a French researcher on Ishiguro. As a translator of Ishiguro's works, Mr. Tsuchiya was once invited to a conference of Kazuo Ishiguro's translators, but he declined the invitation.
As a professional translator, Mr. Tsuchiya told us how a translation should be. He recently put great emphasis on electronic data volume of the original work and its translation. Needless to say, a translation should convey the same meaning as its original, but the electronic data volumes also have to be the same. If you count pages in the English original and its Japanese translation, the number of pages in Japanese is likely to be almost 1.5 times as its original in English. Therefore, we should compare originals and translations not with numbers of pages, but with electronic data volumes.
Using electronic data volumes, Mr. Tsuchiya compared his translation of East of Edenwith that by Takashi Nozaki and Kenzaburo Ohashi (1955). The electronic data volume of translation by Nozaki and Ohashi in each chapter is about 110 to 120 % compared with Steinbeck’s original, while Tsuchiya's translation is constantly 100 % in terms of electronic data volume comparison. According to Mr. Tsuchiya, the secret of equal data volume of his translation is due to his repeated polishes. Mr. Tsuchiya polishes his translation manuscripts on the next day, and in the next week, and this polishing and re-polishing make his translation very close to the original in electronic data volume. He also implied that if the electronic data volume changes drastically in the same translation work, it is possible that the translation was done by more than one person.
In conclusion, he compared translators to pet dogs. Pet dogs usually walk with the owners, who are in this comparison the original writers. The pet dog cannot walk far from the owner because it is held in leash. But Mr. Tsuchiya walks with the original writer very closely, being kept on a short leash. (summarized by Kiyoshi Yamauchi)

from Steinbeck Studies 36 (pp.2-3)