Holy crap! Wow, that is incredibly interesting (and crushing at the same time). Any particular reason why J-E translation is so much more expensive than E-J?
DAMN INTERESTING!
The main reason Japanese-to-English is more expensive than E-to-J is that there are a ton of Japanese who can read English passably well, and can of course write in Japanese. However, in the estimation of one famous J-E translator (William Lise) there are literally less than 10 Japanese native translators who can write truly professional-level English, and those dudes make bank!
So it’s up to us native English speakers who can read Japanese reasonably quickly and accurately, write English well enough, and who also have specialized knowledge in the relevant technical field. Such people are always in short supply. Moreover, professional translation is the most taxing and time-consuming task imaginable, and Japanese-to-English has got to be the hardest language pair of them all. Very few people have the stomach for it, including me, which is why I limit myself to around 20 hours a week and teach English on the side to break up the monotony.
By the way, the $70,000 price I mentioned is on the high end (but not the highest; tops would be maybe $120,000). Why would anyone pay that much? Well, they do! For instance, last summer me and some others translated a major car company’s annual report for shareholders. The company’s budget for the project was a cool million USD, so it’s just a drop in the bucket. Unfortunately, being about five steps removed from the client (client → IR department → financial report production company → translation company → my boss → me), I get to see precious little of that dough. In fact, I’m barely scraping by this year due to the economic effects on the major corporations who are our clients. There has been a really sharp drop-off with no real corporate work to speak of for several months.
Japanese government translation is - of course - doing just fine. It’s funny, too, that the stuff my company asks me to translate for the government is stuff no one will ever read, or that will be read by non-native English speakers and has no need to be written in polished English style. Government departments will blow insane money on silly translations just so that their website has every single random Japanese document in English as well. It’s pretty hilarious when I think about how wasteful it is. Private companies, on the other hand, actually pick and choose what they want translated, as you’d expect.
However, I may have been too pessimistic about the chance for whole books to be translated. If there is a worthy one, the “angel translators” factor sometimes turns out to be more promising than it seems. There are probably quite a few people out there who could and would do it, and who have the spare time. It’s just a matter of finding them.
Thank you for the insightful and very educational post, AJ 
No problem! In my excitement I forgot to mention that of course you could get Okon-level translation (pretty readable English with frequent small errors) for quite cheap, and someone here could just polish it up a bit for publication. That would be pretty inexpensive, maybe only a grand or two for a whole book, or a couple hundred bucks for an article. There are tons and tons of sub-par J-E translators who do work for peanuts. It’s just the professionals who are hard to come by and hence charge through the nose. I don’t think we really need professionals for this, since it’s the ideas we’re after. Professional translation is all about polish. If you just want to “know what something says,” that kind of translation is fairly reasonably priced.
Oh, they link to those other sites. Yeah, that works. Added.
That sounds like exactly how it should be done. Cheap translation + editor. It’s good to know that this is still feasible.
Awesome thread.
Maybe try posting an advert on the mangahelpers forums; it’s more geared towards manga (Japanese comic-book) translations but there are hundreds of translators that use the site.
Also, here’s another paper dealing with Mises, Yamamoto, and the calculation debate. (pdf pages 26-31)
Whoah, I just had a crazy idea. In that interview Okon says that Human Action has been translated into Japanese but that it costs $100 so he can’t assign it to his students.
Well, if HA isn’t in IP limbo anymore, what does that mean for the Japanese translation? Perhaps we can’t copy it word for word, but since the original is not copyrighted anymore, couldn’t someone just do a re-translation by taking the already translated material and altering each sentence just enough? That would take minimal time, then it could be re-issued for cheap!
Would it be considered a derivative work of the J-translation? I think we need the advice of an IP lawyer. Kinsella? TokyoTom?
They published a new edition of Human Action in Japanese last year: http://blog.mises.org/archives/009498.asp
Oh cool, found it (Human Action, ヒューマン・アクション―人間行為の経済学). The problem is, it’s $140. Really few people are going to buy it at that price. How about a free PDF version, or cheaper one with no IP restrictions via the means I mentioned?
By the way, here’s Thomas Woods’s Meltdown (メルトダウン 金融溶解).
$140? This is why Japan needs a Mises Institute.
Does anyone have any details on why specifically he was accused of being pro-Imperialist by McArthur’s occupation forces?
Wow. This is quite a story. I mean to be a Marxist in the late 20’s and a free-market advocate in the 30’s on mainland Japan. This man probably risked his life daily because of the passion he had for his ideas. This man certainly needs to be recognized.