Ted Mahsun

I like the thinking that 1Q84 is pronounced "Q-teen eighty-four". It rolls off the tongue much nicer than "one Q eighty-four". I'm not sure where I read this first but I'm guessing it's Literary Saloon . I'll have to check (but I won't cos I'm lazy today. Well, I've always been lazy. Anyway, I digress.) I'm guessing the huge tome will be making its way to the English-speaking shores by the middle of next year. In a recent interview at asahi.com , Jay Rubin (one of Murakami's translators) revealed that he'll be finishing his translation of books 1 and 2 of 1Q84 by mid-November and Philip Gabriel is supposed to finish book 3 by then. So my first reaction to this is, "yay! There's finally some real progress and I can hope of reading it soon(ish)!" but my second reaction is more important, which is, "WHAT, there's two translators working on this???" Now I understand why they chose to go this rout...

It used to be that Haruki Murakami was very shy with the press, especially the Japanese press. But in recent years that shyness must have cast off a little. It looks like he's in the news every other month now. While I won't be surprised if he gave a comprehensive interview to a foreign newspaper (it's outside the shores of Japan where he's celebrated as a literary sensation, while he's seen as more of a hack within), it does surprise me that Murakami would give such a long and interesting review to a Japanese paper–the interview spans 5 webpages over 5 days. (Personally I've been hopping with glee with all this Murakami news pouring in!) I guess times must have changed? There's a lot of new and interesting nuggets spilled by Murakami in the interview, which discusses his work translating English classics into Japanese, his next novel(an epic worthy of The Wind-up Bird Chronicle !), how English literature and translating English literature influences his wri...

A few months ago, I had read that Haruki Murakami had a new book out in Japan . The book is about his experience running in marathons. He's quite the accomplished runner, having run in the Boston, New York and Tokyo marathons, amongst others. I didn't think it would get translated into English since a lot of Murakami's non-fiction which have been published in Japan gets ignored by his translators. And rightly too. If you've read the unofficial fan translations of his essays, they're mostly insubstantial or ephemeral. Sometimes even laughable, in a bad sort of way, and I don't think it's the fault of the translations. Murakami likes to surprise me even outside his fiction, I guess. Soon the new book will be his first non-fiction book to be published in English since Underground , which tells the accounts of the survivors of Aum Shinrikyo gas attack on the Tokyo subway in 1995. The new book is called What I Talk About When I Talk About Running and is translat...

Looks like PTS wants translators to translate the works of Jules Verne into Malay. Interested? Go sign up . I personally would love to see this project come to fruition, as long as the works are translated with complete and utter care. (There's also a Sherlock Holmes translation project ongoing of which I am keen on as well.) But I have to wonder. Will these translators translate Jules Verne's works from English? I doubt PTS will be able to find enough good translators to translate from the original French. If this is so, how true will the translations be to the originals? It's bad enough that some of the original English translations--which I assume PTS will work from since they are out of copyright and therefore free--are considered not up to snuff . Even Jules Verne lamented about the translations of his time, saying, "I’m not surprised that the translations you’ve been speaking to me about are bad ... But we can do nothing about it, absolutely nothing." Bu...

by Nisah Haji Haron ; translated from malay by Ted Mahsun If a writer translates another writer's work, does the copyright belong to the translator or the original writer of the work? Translated works are commonly found on the market. Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka has also published translated works, especially from winners of literary prizes such as the Nobel Prize and the like. If you go to Indonesia or China, the phenomena of abundant translated works is very much the norm. Recently published books, like Harry Potter, have an Indonesian or Mandarin version within a period of not more than a month. Are these translators called plagiarisers because of translating a work that has already been published earlier and was written by the original author? In Malaysia, this question has to be referred to the Copyright Act 1987. Within copyright laws, ideas are not protected. They only protect the expression of the idea. This means that when a later author repeats a sentence that was used by an...