I came across Kazutoki Umezu’s Vietnamese Gospel about five or six years ago and have loved it since then. The album cover and music are very much what I can imagine about southeast Asia, where post-war wounds blend with warm evening breezes.
Vietnamese Gospel – Kazutoki Umezu
And then recently a friend of mine accidentally found an alternative version with lyrics by Komuro and his band. It was a night in Provincetown. Early summer, light rain at times, and we just watched Clouds of Sils Maria.
I hated the song the first time I heard it because the lyrics sounded like all the Japanese songs you’d hear. But then I started to find the vocals so good, like Maki’s style, tributes to life. And I had a feeling that the song was sung for memorizing some kind of war and people’s hope of meeting their descendants (like I still think Mizutani’s Distant Memories is about political rebellion and revolution).
I tried to look up the lyrics or any interpretations but couldn’t find anything, so I transcribed them. I found lyrics quite hard to translate, especially for a language like Japanese where every word can be a euphemism, so I’ll not ruin it. Probably just put them in a translator to get a sense of what they are singing.
They are not singing anything in particular anyway 🙂
Last semester I wrote a one-page summary for a JREE (The Journal for Research on Educational Effectiveness) paper. The summary was recently published on the forum. Check it out if you are interested in reading about how technologies can enhance child reading comprehension.
I revisited the novel Deep River in the class Buddhism and Contemporary Texts at Amherst College (Fall 2019). Reading it in English faded its eastern sense of mystery (or maybe because 6 years have passed and I grew up), but I was thus able to focus on its story. I don’t personally like Endo (probably because I am too sensitive to wars), neither do I think Mitsuko is a nihilist (but language is a fluid thing), but the “many faces of god”: dichotomies and reunifications presented by the characters are interesting to look at.
2019 fall – 2020 spring, I tried to find and prove the most efficient ways to pinpoint an object in a shaded area (with Joe). The problem was derived from tumor detection.
Here we have an abstract submitted to CCCG-2020 (my first rejected manuscript:) ):
In 2019 I and Cindy did a translation for an LGBTQ video made by students at Doshisha Women’s College of Liberal Arts. The lyrics’ brainwashing, I still sing it.
We put some of our thoughts about the translation process at the end.
This is a project (fall 2019, JPN III – Contemporary Texts) that digs into what can be translated and what cannot. I see many unnatural expressions now but I’ll just leave it as that.
I do NLU so it was kind of funny for me to look at this. I thought quite a lot about how to improve knowledge representations to capture nuances in cultural differences when I was working on this research paper. But if humans themselves don’t concur in the same representation, how would you expect machines to…
NinH 