April 15, 2016
JET teacher Laurence's April Blog Post!
Hey everyone, Laurence here.
This month started on high note with the sakura in full bloom!
This might be bit cliché, but coming to Japan and being able to watch the sakura in full bloom had been a dream of mine for a long time.
I love flowers so that was one of the reasons why but frankly, to me going to a hanami meant that I had accomplished something. That I had somehow managed to come to Japan and stay long enough to saw the weather change and the flowers bloom. I took a lot of pictures, but for the sake of keeping the size of this blog manageable I am going to post only a few.
During my time off this month I decided get my translation muscle working and take part in the locJam, which is an international translating event.
For this special contest, we had to translate a fictional board game called “The Hotel of Madness” (which I realized only much later was directly inspired by The Shining) from English to a language of choice (within those available on the list). The word count was around 3,000 words, but the real challenge was to edit the graphical elements of the game as well make it so my translation fit into the existing formatting of the game’s manual. Lots of time spent into that. But I got it done! We’ll know if I won in June, but even if I don’t win, it was still nice to do some translation work for a change.
See you next month!
Laurence Dube
JET Assistant Language Teacher