| Pages in topic: < [1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13] > | Off topic: In my craft or sullen art: JA-EN financial translation Thread poster: Dan Lucas
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Dan Lucas 
United Kingdom
Local time: 09:25
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER | Translating kessan tanshin (決算短信) | Jan 28 |
Yesterday morning the wind was bitter, but while it is still blowing hard it seems warmer out there today. The dog and I leave first thing under a waning moon that is still bright enough to illuminate whole sky and a single recent contrail that stretches from east to west across the firmament. Probably an early flight from Heathrow heading over to the US. As I follow the dog trotting along the footpath I wonder what the people sitting in that tube of metal are thinking, doing, feeling. Are they ... See more Yesterday morning the wind was bitter, but while it is still blowing hard it seems warmer out there today. The dog and I leave first thing under a waning moon that is still bright enough to illuminate whole sky and a single recent contrail that stretches from east to west across the firmament. Probably an early flight from Heathrow heading over to the US. As I follow the dog trotting along the footpath I wonder what the people sitting in that tube of metal are thinking, doing, feeling. Are they glad to be headed home? Worried about what awaits them there? Or, as I often was when I made such trips on business, just a little bored with it all?
I completed one job yesterday, which I will submit this evening, and today my first task is another job of about 1,800 characters, which I hope to complete this morning. This consists of part of a kessan tanshin (決算短信 in Japanese): an abbreviated report on a set of recently closed accounts, typically 20-30 pages, though it might be more or less.
A kessan tanshin usually provides a summary of the figures on the front page, a qualitative review of the period to which it relates, a statement of income (P&L) and the balance sheet, and possibly statements of cash flow. When people talk about an earnings release or announcement (決算発表) it is usually the kessan tanshin that is the underlying document.
Listed companies must submit a quarterly report every three months in accordance with Article 24-4-7 of the Financial Instruments and Exchange Act, and that must be done within 45 days of the end of the period to which it refers. Most listed companies have a fiscal year that ends on March 31, so the fiscal year runs from April 1 to March 31, and the third quarter ends on December 31. If you take 45 days from that you get a date in the middle of February, and most companies will want to submit before that. (It is because of this "need for speed" that kessan tanshin are not required to be audited.) As you can imagine, this creates a bulge of demand between the middle of January and the first couple of weeks of February.
Below I have provided screenshots of the kessan tanshin for the fiscal year ended March 31, 2023 for a company called Daikin, which is a global supplier of air conditioning equipment and related products. I am not 100% certain, but I don't think I have ever translated any of this company's materials, so it is a kind of "neutral" organization from my perspective and the reason I chose it. The first screenshot is in Japanese, and the second is the translation in English.
The front page material is standardized and thus from a translation perspective there is very little work there. Most of the material that needs to be translated is contained in the overview of operating results a few pages in. In this section the management discusses recent trading, the overall business environment, recent initiatives, and basically anything else it wishes to talk about. This will contain a good deal of information that doesn't change materially from quarter to quarter, but there will usually be something new that requires translation.
And that is what I will be translating today, for a completely different company (not Daikin).
Japanese:
English:
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| | | | Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 09:25
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER
Another warm and slightly damp morning, although it is not actually raining when Biscuit and I venture out for our walk.
I forgot to mention that on Saturday my wife and I popped over to a little bakery in Fishguard called Nourish, which started a couple of years ago in the middle of the covid pandemic and has done really well. We visit often, and the owners seem to be ... See more Another warm and slightly damp morning, although it is not actually raining when Biscuit and I venture out for our walk.
I forgot to mention that on Saturday my wife and I popped over to a little bakery in Fishguard called Nourish, which started a couple of years ago in the middle of the covid pandemic and has done really well. We visit often, and the owners seem to be on first-name terms with many of their customers, which is a good sign. I love to see a worthy business succeeding. On Saturday we arrived too late to grab the special, which was pistachio cloud tarts (see photo below), so we had to be content with a loaf of sourdough and a hazelnut pain au chocolat. Isn't life tragic...
On the way back we stopped to get milk at a farm called Morfa. I'm not sure of the origin of the name but I suspect it's a combination of the Welsh môr (sea) and fan (a mutated form of "man", which means place), which would be "sea place" though I haven't looked it up to confirm. It would certainly be apposite, given that the farm is perched on the cliffs above Fishguard, which gives it magnificent views and fearful exposure to the wind. The owners still run herds with calves at foot, and it lovely to see baby cows trotting along after their mothers in the spring.
I was brought up on smallholdings with milk cows and for a while we ran a small dairy farm, so I know good milk when I taste it. Morfa's milk is excellent, and it has established its own little processing plant and vending machine on site. You literally put a bottle into the machine, close the transparent shutter, and press a button (payment is by contactless card or coins). The farm runs a mixed herd rather than Holstein Friesians only, and the butterfat content is probably for that reason noticeably higher than a competitor further up the coast. The additional creaminess is what makes it so good.
Again, a successful local business. It is great to see initiative and hard work being rewarded. This is a bottle I took out of the fridge a few minutes ago.
I had a solid weekend work-wise, submitting one job as per deadline and another job ahead of deadline, and I also made significant inroads into the larger job. The latter has required a substantial amount of research. It is far from being the first translation I have done that concerns the pharmaceutical industry, and some things (like clinical testing phases) are common to all companies in that space.
What has also helped me is that when I worked as an analyst I used to sit in the morning meeting (every morning at 7:30 AM) and listen to the other analysts speak about their sectors, and of course the pharmaceutical industry was one of those. So I had a rough idea of the terminology used and the structure of the industry. Having said that, this is discussion by management of the future product and development plans of the company, and is therefore not so complex that I cannot deal with it. I will finish that translation today and submit it this evening.
That aside, I have nothing on as I type this, but I expect three projects to be handed off to me today, and another seven later in the week. A couple of those are larger rather than smaller, so I will be pretty busy by Friday as "busy season" accelerates towards its peak.
Dan
PS on a rather glum and gray January morning, it is good to remind ourselves that the planet is still orbiting the sun, and that spring and summer will come again, so here's a photo of flag irises in June a couple of fields away from the house.
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| | | | Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 09:25
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER
Yesterday afternoon I was surprised by request from a client in Japan to translate around 1,300 characters into English for a conference taking place today. Obviously, this was somewhat urgent, and I had to scramble to get it done given that I had my fortnightly singing thing going on in the evening.
It occurs to me that this was one of the situations in which being in a different time zone helps, because the PM is able to hand it off to me in the evening and get it back on her desk... See more Yesterday afternoon I was surprised by request from a client in Japan to translate around 1,300 characters into English for a conference taking place today. Obviously, this was somewhat urgent, and I had to scramble to get it done given that I had my fortnightly singing thing going on in the evening.
It occurs to me that this was one of the situations in which being in a different time zone helps, because the PM is able to hand it off to me in the evening and get it back on her desk the following morning.
It also occurs to me that there are probably short and urgent jobs that the PMs hand off in the morning (JST) to translators in the same time zone with the expectation of getting them back in the evening on the same day. No doubt they never come to me with such proposals in the first place.
Quiet day today: three small jobs to do, two kessan tanshin and one presentation, only around 2k in all.
Dan ▲ Collapse
| | | | Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 09:25
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER
There's an old saying on the lines of "If you want to get something done, give it to a busy person." I find that when I'm busy I am effective and efficient, but when I have little to do I tend to become strangely inefficient. So it proved to be yesterday, when I needed to do only 2,000 characters that (of course!) I submitted on time, but only after a bit of a scramble.
Today I have a similar issue in that a project that was estimated at 2,000 characters came in at slightly over 300... See more There's an old saying on the lines of "If you want to get something done, give it to a busy person." I find that when I'm busy I am effective and efficient, but when I have little to do I tend to become strangely inefficient. So it proved to be yesterday, when I needed to do only 2,000 characters that (of course!) I submitted on time, but only after a bit of a scramble.
Today I have a similar issue in that a project that was estimated at 2,000 characters came in at slightly over 300 characters, which is a very significant difference. It has left me with lots of free time today, but sparked various other thoughts.
One is that, as I have long been aware, end client and clients are working assiduously to squeeze all the repetition and boilerplate translation out of kessan tanshin (the quarterly financial results documents filed by listed companies), and today's shrunken job is a classic example of that tendency.
However, a back of the envelope calculation suggests that the volume of work I completed in 2023 was up 5% to 10% year on year, which accords with my feeling that I have been busier over the most recent 12-month period than I was during the 12-month period before that. So, while clients continue to squeeze out boilerplate in some areas, I have probably benefited from increases in demand in other areas.
Another thought is that I have always kept an eye on monthly revenues, but not so much on the number of characters completed. Going forward I intend to track volume more accurately. I should be able to get a fairly accurate picture of the number of characters translated in any specific period by multiplying the payment in GBP by the exchange rate for JPY or EUR, and dividing the result by my rate for the client in question. Ideally that should be automated rather than manual.
Dan ▲ Collapse
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Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 09:25
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER
The moon was slightly more than half-full early this morning, but the light it cast was bright enough to illuminate a little plume of smoke from the chimney as the dog and I came back from our walk. It was a chilly 2.7°C at the time, so the warmth of the newly lit stove was welcome.
Later on in the morning I receive a flurry of emails, and go from having one active project with a few hundred characters to four projects and 16,000 characters, of which only two jobs with a total of 4... See more The moon was slightly more than half-full early this morning, but the light it cast was bright enough to illuminate a little plume of smoke from the chimney as the dog and I came back from our walk. It was a chilly 2.7°C at the time, so the warmth of the newly lit stove was welcome.
Later on in the morning I receive a flurry of emails, and go from having one active project with a few hundred characters to four projects and 16,000 characters, of which only two jobs with a total of 4,000 characters had actually been booked.
Another reminder that things can change quickly, especially when a client has a big presentation that they suddenly need translating. What was going to be a slow and steady weekend is instead going to be busy. Well, you have to make hay while the sun shines, so I shall grit my teeth, which is something I do a lot of during busy season.
Dan ▲ Collapse
| | | | Chris Spurgin
United Kingdom
Local time: 09:25
Member (2016)
Russian to English
+ ...
| Baran Keki
Türkiye
Local time: 11:25
Member
English to Turkish
Dan Lucas wrote:
I don't doubt your taste in milk, but that 'gmail.com' seems like a deal-breaker to me. They probably wouldn't do well at the Dragons' Dan, what with gmail.com being associated with scammers and all that...
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Baran Keki wrote:
Dragons' Dan
That would be interesting. Sat next to Theo and Pete and Deborah.
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Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 09:25
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER | Never buy milk from anywhere without a domain name? | Feb 2 |
Baran Keki wrote:
I don't doubt your taste in milk, but that 'gmail.com' seems like a deal-breaker to me.
I kind of see your point...
| | | | Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 09:25
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER
I spent some time yesterday working on a small utility in Python to automatically download exchange rates from the Bank of England website, extract revenue figures from the company bank account, look up rates for each client stored in a JSON file, and from this retrospectively estimate volumes (in Japanese characters) per month and year.
Generally speaking I haven't bothered tracking volume in the past as I generally fluctuate between "busy" and "very busy", at least in subjective t... See more I spent some time yesterday working on a small utility in Python to automatically download exchange rates from the Bank of England website, extract revenue figures from the company bank account, look up rates for each client stored in a JSON file, and from this retrospectively estimate volumes (in Japanese characters) per month and year.
Generally speaking I haven't bothered tracking volume in the past as I generally fluctuate between "busy" and "very busy", at least in subjective terms. During busy seasons I do pay close attention to how much I can handle on a daily basis, but that is a different scale to yearly volume.
A few days ago in a different part of the forum, I estimated that my volumes were up 5-10% year on year in 2023. It's actually slightly more complicated than that because the fiscal year-end of the company is at the end of February, not the end of December. Anyway, after taking that into account it looks like volumes will be up around 10-15%. Revenues will not rise quite so strongly because of the weaker yen, which means that the money I earn from Japanese clients results in fewer pounds sterling when converted.
The chart below shows volumes on a fiscal-year basis, and we still have one month to go in the current fiscal year, which is the rightmost bar on the chart. Over the longer term the chart shows that business slowed in the fiscal year ended February 29, 2020 (although the year preceding that was unusually good) and that the fiscal year ended February 28, 2021 showed another small decline, which reflects in part the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Volumes recovered well in the year following the pandemic, and were stable in the year ended February 28, 2023. This year volume has risen sharply, despite a weaker than normal earnings season in May 2023.
Mind you, it is well not to get too excited about such short-term fluctuations. Half of that year-on-year increase can be explained by one large job that I tackled in September and October 2023. If I had not had taken on that project, which was very demanding in terms of timetabling, volumes this fiscal year would only have been up about 5% year on year.
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| | | | Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 09:25
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER | How do I view thee? Let me count the ways. | Feb 3 |
A dark and slightly drizzly morning walk, with no redeeming features. I have a busy weekend ahead of me, having had two fairly lazy days last week which came to an abrupt end when clients sprang some unexpected projects on me on Thursday and especially Friday. I have at least 6,500 characters to complete by Monday morning, and hopefully quite a bit more.
Yesterday I mentioned the work I had done on tracking the volume of characters translated, and showed some annual data that was ba... See more A dark and slightly drizzly morning walk, with no redeeming features. I have a busy weekend ahead of me, having had two fairly lazy days last week which came to an abrupt end when clients sprang some unexpected projects on me on Thursday and especially Friday. I have at least 6,500 characters to complete by Monday morning, and hopefully quite a bit more.
Yesterday I mentioned the work I had done on tracking the volume of characters translated, and showed some annual data that was based on monthly amounts received from clients, from which I derive an estimate of the volume. Today I'm going to take a different view of the same data. Time series data such as this is often noisy and has seasonal components that are not usually well demonstrated by a simple representation such as a line chart. Here is the monthly data in a basic layout, without any tweaks to the colouring or format.
It's a bit spiky isn't it. Particularly for monthly timeseries data, it is often useful to present the data in a way that enables the viewer to get a sense of the seasonal patterns in the data. One way to approach this is a so-called facet plot, which is very similar to the "small multiples" technique I mentioned in a recent post elsewhere in the forum. If we apply that here, we get something like the following.
To my mind, that is a more useful visualization. We need to bear in mind that this particular set of data is estimated, because we have not used the exact exchange rates for each transaction. Instead we have applied the average spot exchange rate for the month as a proxy. Ideally we should go back and try to ascertain the exact exchange rate used for each payment made in an overseas currency, but the data is not easily extracted and that is therefore more work than I am prepared to do. We should also note that the data is based on actual payments, which typically occur at least a month after the work was completed.
For example, looking at the facet plot above suggests that I am usually very busy in June every year, but that is not the case: I am actually very busy from late April to the middle of May. However, the payments for May are not received until June, and that is what pushes up revenue for that month.
The data can also be affected by simple logistical issues such as banking. As an example, if you look at the fiscal year marked "Feb-2021", you will see a blank for August. That doesn't mean that I didn't do anything in July of that year, but rather that by coincidence all the payments were made in late July/early September, with none actually landing in August itself.
This kind of anomaly at the monthly level can be mitigated by viewing the data at a quarterly or annual level. As it happens, that was a particularly weak quarter (in my case the second quarter of the fiscal year is June, July, and August), but that's a story for another day.
Should you be making charts like these? No, this is just me brushing up my Python/Plotly skills, as in the past I have mostly used ggplot and the R programming language for this. It's also a case of having a bit of nostalgic fun, as I used to do a lot of this sort of thing when I worked in the markets.
Finally, it's about me trying to get a sense of my workload and order inflows that is not reliant on revenue, which is unavoidably distorted by foreign exchange rates. You can achieve the same thing with a pen and paper or a simple Excel spreadsheet, if you think it makes sense for you. From reading the forum it seems many people are ahead of me in this regard, and that I am a laggard.
Dan ▲ Collapse
| | | | Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 09:25
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER | The ins and outs of presentations | Feb 4 |
This morning's walk was starless, moonless, and generally boring. However, as I look outside at half past seven in the morning it is already light. Spring is coming.
In terms of work, yesterday was a reasonable day, and I estimate that I completed around 7,000 characters, albeit with some help from the TM. That was split into two main projects, which were presentations for two separate end clients. I completed one and I'm about one third of the way through the other, which is not d... See more This morning's walk was starless, moonless, and generally boring. However, as I look outside at half past seven in the morning it is already light. Spring is coming.
In terms of work, yesterday was a reasonable day, and I estimate that I completed around 7,000 characters, albeit with some help from the TM. That was split into two main projects, which were presentations for two separate end clients. I completed one and I'm about one third of the way through the other, which is not due to be submitted until Wednesday.
Today is going to be busy due to the need to complete a presentation for one client, three press releases of varying sizes for another client, and a few hundred characters from a kessan tanshin for a third client. All told, about 6,000 characters.
Fortunately I am reasonably familiar with the end clients themselves, which makes a big difference. Once I start translating, the process of subconsciously updating myself on the latest developments of the company will unfold. "Oh yes, the packaging business, I did wonder whether their Taiwanese factory had recovered from that accident. Delayed for another two months? Oh dear." Carrying at least some of that history in one's head makes the whole process a good deal easier.
On the subject of presentations, below you will see a screenshot of the slides used by Daikin Industries in May of last year, and which pertain to the fiscal year ended March 31, 2023. This was probably used in the results briefing (決算説明会) that followed the announcement (決算発表), which would have been attended only by institutional investors and analysts. I have attended many hundreds of such meetings, but I'll tell you about that another time.
I was not associated with this document in any way, but these files are in the public domain and available to download from the corporate website. I chose this partly because I have no involvement with the company, and partly because it is representative of an organization that seems to be rather old-fashioned in its approach to engaging with the markets.
Note the text-heavy page. Chunks of running text that are hard to digest, simple tables, and a slightly random-looking scattering of annotations. Observe the classic Japanese use of "128%" rather than "+28% YoY". This is typical of the presentation as a whole - none of those global standards or fancy visualizations for you, you uppity shareholder! - which, together with its brevity, suggests to me that the company has minimal interest in communicating with the investment community. I am sure that the company does in fact loudly proclaim (words...) that it is interested, but the mediocrity of this material (actions...) does not support such an assertion.
Having leafed through the presentation, nearly all of it seems to consist of data that is already in the kessan tanshin. There might be a bit of qualitative information that is not presented in the kessan tanshin (I haven't compared them), but it is redolent of a company that knows it is not going to be delisted and that therefore doesn't feel any urgency about engaging with shareholders. This is the English translation which, as you can see, gets the information across but is quite stilted.
I wouldn't be surprised to learn that this was translated by a non-native speaker or simply somebody in the IR department. It is a very literal rendering, even down to the ordering of the sentences. To be fair, it may be that this is translated professionally and that the company simply insists on the approach described above. Traditional companies that are not confident in their ability to project themselves in English tend to police their translations fiercely, which just results in a vicious cycle of bad English.
By contrast, I am translating a presentation for a company that was established less than 10 years ago. This document is nearly 3 times the length of Daikin's presentation, is content-rich and carefully laid out, and clearly driven by the desire (and the need) to communicate its appeal to shareholders and investors. This company is a tiny, tiny fraction of the size of Daikin Industries, and will require a good deal of investment going forward to fuel its growth. It is motivated to communicate its message clearly and persuasively.
That's the difference. At least as far as I can tell from this presentation, Daikin Industries is a lot more complacent in its dealings with shareholders and potential shareholders. This is not a reflection on Daikin's products, and if I were in the market for that kind of thing I would buy one of Daikin's air-conditioners like a shot. But from an investor relations perspective, this company isn't very impressive based on what I have seen.
Dan
[Edited at 2024-02-04 09:19 GMT] ▲ Collapse
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Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 09:25
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER
My first project has been completed, lunch has been and gone, and I have updated my little library of past materials for the next batch of three files (all from the same end client). This will help me to maintain continuity with previous translations, except of course where I think they have gone amiss.
In short, I'm ready for round two.
And when that is done, our 17-year-old Toyota Vitz requires its oil topping up. It's non-stop glamour and excitement round here.
... See more My first project has been completed, lunch has been and gone, and I have updated my little library of past materials for the next batch of three files (all from the same end client). This will help me to maintain continuity with previous translations, except of course where I think they have gone amiss.
In short, I'm ready for round two.
And when that is done, our 17-year-old Toyota Vitz requires its oil topping up. It's non-stop glamour and excitement round here.
Dan ▲ Collapse
| | | | Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 09:25
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER
Dan Lucas wrote:
And when that is done, our 17-year-old Toyota Vitz requires its oil topping up.
Narrator's voice: The Vitz did not get its oil.
| | | | Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 09:25
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER | Sweets for my sweet | Feb 5 |
Some fully synthetic 5W30 for a hardworking little car.
Not sure if this is the vehicular equivalent of sugar for my honey but it'll have to do.
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