Out of college, I did some QC work for a Japanese electronics company that
has an office here in Connecticut. For a few years, I could at least
pronounce 98% of Katakana characters. Since Katakana is used for foreign or
technical terms, I could pretty much figure out little bits of the text
phonetically, but not enough to do a real translation. I can understand from
the sound what Tomita is doing, so I once thought about just "making up" a
translation, but I would really like to have the proper text.
Akihabara sounds like something out of "Blade Runner" or a Gibson novel.
Did you get the scans okay?
I'll work on "Sound Creature" scans, but it's a lot to scan. Without having
it in front of me, it's like... ten or so 12" x 12" pages with three text
columns per page, plus his doodles. I'd like to send it to you in a format
that is very methodical so that if you could put side-by-side translations
in and send them back to me, I can reconstruct an English CD booklet, maybe
transfer SC to CD-R. My vinyl copy is pristine-in my anal youth, I only ever
played my vinyl albums once (using a Shure V-15 type V cartridge),
immediately transferring them to DBX cassettes that I could play to death.
Might be possible to get a pretty decent transfer out of this.
I'm very excited!
-----Original Message-----
From:The Old Crow [mailto:
oldcrow@...]
Pretty much. Not as well as someone from Japan. I know
about half of
the 2,000 kanji the typical newpaper reader in Japan knows.
I can usually
guess the meaning of other kanji letters, but have to look
up which sound
to use in a given word. The hiragana/katakana are easy,
though.