Encouraging school

How to apply encouragement as a core feature of training in school? I am about to start a new course session on introductory interpretation, consecutive, for French learners, something broadly referred to as "beginners liaison interpreting in business". I have been running this course for a little more than a year now. In the meantime, many readings, many self-mumbling and reflections, some exposed here, have led to a progressive evolution of the course. One emerging feature, call it "dimension", is that of encouragement, and enlargement of the course. I see the course as spilling over the time imparted to it, a mere 2 hours weekly. I want the students - all grown-ups - to leave the course charged with a higher willingness to progress. I will have them carry something to read at each course ends. This will be new. A piece of article to much on in the subway, the train. To vocalize back home. I will lad the course blog with suggestions on content to listen, to shadow, to follow, to get wet with. No homework to bring back next time except the preparation of next time course, something to watch/listen to, or read. I want to train the next generation of Japanese spies, make them the James Bond of communication competence, aces of cultural deconstruction, make them shine. Well, maybe that's going over the board. The point is how to encourage going through the chores of massive listening and reading which are the basis of true progression. That will be the core thematic issue of the coming weeks.

City immersion

That's the future? English villages or islands for complete immersion. Props - blond with blue eyes - must be in high demand in Korea these days. But the scenario is no utopia. Parents want their children to learn English, not to experience living abroad. The Jeju island English town will be a Disneyland kind of campus-city less the fear and stress of living ... abroad. Anthropology is said to be loosing ground more than ever as democratized plane trips have open up the doors to brief stays here and there, all over the world littered with familiar signs, the Starbucks of the globalized world. Coming next an English only day at Tokyo Disneyland.

Degrees of immersion

I found an overview presentation of what interpretation at large requires in terms of learning and dedication. I assume it is related with a Chinese interpreting curriculum delivered at Dokkyo University. The document is in Japanese and comes as a pdf document. Incidentally, it is not the first time that I feel like Japanese interpreters of Chinese seem to be more open and talk the trade online than other language pairs.

The document is well-rounded with an ultimate focus on simultaneous as usual, but it lists up the various self-training methods one can apply at home to progress. It doesn't take into account the Internet but this doesn't matter. It's mute on liaison interpreting because the subject doesn't exist for conference interpreters. I will try and shrink it down to what I consider more important for liaison interpreting and deliver the result to my new students starting next week.

It's not obsession, but as I wrote earlier, AJATT is important to me, although I by no means belong to the cultural artifacts that are highlighted in the "method", everything that spells Japanese pop-culture. It is the spirit I am sensible to, and definitely what is pointed out as far as the power of community encouragement can be. I mean, a community of self-learners. In the latest post, the author gives a brief glimpse at his massive strategy to massive immersion for Cantonese Chinese. I am quoting :

"I have Cantonese TV and movies playing close to 24/7 in my house, and put a laptop in the kitchen so I can watch things like The Simpsons Movie (that’s right, son, there’s a Canto dub…Marge, Lisa, Bart and Flanders’ voices are dead on; Homer’s is “re-interpreted” slightly, but I never liked his original voice anyway) while washing dishes, and I have Chinese comics in the restroom, and Chinese newspapers pasted all over my walls, and Chinese books permanently sitting in my manbag ready to go anywhere I do, and…yeah…and stuff. But once you get those things set up, it’s almost all just a matter of, how you say in the simple English…sitting back and watching. Once you do set up and maintain the right environment, all that’s left is to show up…to exist."

I am almost jealous I don't have the room to pin down the poster on the wall, and eat Chinese food, and yet another room turned Italian for the pasta version of immersion.

But the approach makes so much sense.

There are degrees of immersion and the Dokkyo presentation just hint at doing focused listening, or silent shadowing, that is, in the mind, when walking around in public. But it stops digging deeper.

I spent an hour at the Sanseido bookstore, flipping over the books. The very the standard few examples that advertise massive immersion to the target language although like other books, they are - for well know local marketing purposes - laden thick with Japanese. You never release the hand from the false comfort of having everything explained in Japanese, and everything translated in Japanese. A little independence of mind would make this 多聴多読 a flop elsewhere.

Anyway, I like the extreme degree of immersion trumped by AJATT. It leaves no room to procrastination. It also open up the possibilities that there are pattern of environmental immersion that does not related to language learning but to other subject as well. What would the detailed Italian or French room look like? But what about physics, math or photovoltaics?

Free tech stuff

Good audio snippets for self-training and teaching that comes free of charge as an add-on to the book "An Introduction to Technical Japanese". Good stuff.

The optimistic company

My latest assignment was with a repeater customer. I noticed how recurrent the affirmation "We are an optimistic company" invariably popped up in the many discussion. Emotional investment when on assignment, especially for several days, and with customers with whom there is a good reciprocal felling, are a little bit hard to manage. When things are other, there is that tedious gapping for air kind of feeling until the next assignment pops up to compensate for the lost. Is the optimistic interpreter reachable?

Ability to captivate an audience

An interesting presentation yesterday at the monthly JAT meeting. I went because there was the word interpreting in the session name. Opportunities to hear about interpretation from practitioners beyond the standard local lip service are so rare. The presenter was a bilingual Japanese engineer. I was both glad and unsurprised that his presentation covered practical aspects of the job you usually do not hear or read about from the conventional shut clams that are Japanese interpreters.

One remark about his role of interpreter cum moderator during negotiations stroke a strong chord when he remarked apologetically that this may not be the job of an interpreter. This role of cultural negotiator as well as communication flow and dynamics moderator and controller was somewhat strangely coined with the inadequate (to me) expression "Ability to captivate an audience". I would rather call this role that is not permanent during the exchange as the competence equivalent to the flight controller. The interpreter must not be the pilot but a flight controller and path discreet fine tuner on top of the standard linguistic agent.

My own experience is that clients - mine have always been non-Japanese - will always appreciate you do not behave as a simple conduit but as a broker, moderator, communication flow (as flight) controller. In such situation where temperature rises and harsh words start popping up, when people do not wait for the interpreter but jump in-between to tell their stance with emphasis, the interpreter not able to go beyond the mere role of linguistic agent and grab for a short while the plane stick will be wiped out and her lameness exposed.

Extracted from the article "Community Interpreting : Re-conciliation through power management, Raffael Merlini, Roberta Favaron"

"a clear illustration of the
interpreter's cultural brokering and advocacy functions, as cited in Giovannini
(1992) and reported in Roberts (1997: 26), is the Cultural Interpreter Training
Manual issued by the Ontario Ministry of Citizenship. Listed among the
interpreter's roles and responsibilities are the following: to explain cultural
differences and misunderstandings; to advise the client about rights and options;
to ensure that the client has all relevant information and controls the interaction;
to explain what may lie behind the client's responses and decisions; to challenge
racially/culturally prejudiced statements or conclusions; to identify and resolve
conflicts. When the interpreter is called upon to concentrate on the last of the
above points, advocacy gives way to conciliation, a function which, according
to Diane Schneider of the Community Relations Service of the U.S. Department
of Justice, "is performed more frequently than one might imagine, without being
defined as such" (1992: 57).
Leaving aside, for the moment, the latter approaches which allow no
ambiguity as to the nature and scope of the practitioner's role, but are considered
by many to fall outside the range of interpreting proper, and looking at the more
canonical landscape of normative literature, one cannot fail to recognise the
relevance to today's situation of the comment made in the late 1970s by
Anderson that "the interpreter's role is always partially undefined – that is, the
role prescriptions are objectively inadequate" (1976: 216). "

Aging

I remember vividly these days how F. who is a long time professional guide interpreter in France told me last time that aging was a positive factor as you start getting respect from your Japanese clients. So maybe it's time to highlight the wrinkles and whiten the hairs ahead of time. In the last month, I have been praised beyond the standard hot air by the Japanese counterparts of my non-Japanese clients. In the past week, two ended the show with asking me if I were available sometimes in the future for direct assignment requests. Besides inevitable lip service, this kind of inquiry is new to me, and salient enough to be noticed as something new in the interaction conventions. I will see to push the pawns soon and see what happens with down to earth expectations for results.

Free

The only tangible comment I have read so far at LinkedIn about the crowdsourcing translation incident is that translators should say NO to a free commercial ride request. Everything worth repeating is this : Say NO. A banner on your web site should tell the world you say NO. Period. No argumenting, no debate with the other side. Just a plain and healthy NO. Where is the banner?

Computer Aided Liaison Interpretation

Two days in a row where I have put my MacBook into full view on the meeting table as an aid for interpretation. It makes for a lot of things around, besides the IC dictionary I ended up not using. Block of paper, too many business cards, Evian bottles and snacks courtesy of the visited. No LAN Internet access so I have to rely on wireless. I wonder if Wimax does make a real difference. E-Mobile is simply too slow and adds stress when queries take time to yield back results. But the configuration is useful though. I have observed myself delivering for the day presentation an discovered something interesting, that I would look to my notes, to people's faces and to my laptop screen alternatively, but especially to the computer screen ... as a conscious way to concentrate, to keep focused on phrasing back the message rather than cueing words. It's a strange situation I will try and follow next time to try and understand the meaning of it. Feeling more secure by the sight of the PC screen. What does it mean?

Incidentally, tools are missing for proper display in the context of interpretation words prepared prior to the session as well as word caught and queried during the session. A simple task robotization should allow to simply copy paste a word in an ad hoc file featuring so sort of auto formating. All this still very fuzzy.

My easy Japanese

You know the standard reciprocal pavlovian situation here : when you are said "Your Japanese is (really) good", it should translate : you're still far from home baby. Or so the saying goes. I tend to think that the saying is as much part of the illusion than the sentence said. But what about that one : "your Japanese is very easy to understand."? I got this first time comment from the other side - Japanese - at the end of an assignment the other day. How'd ya interpret that beyond the clear enough meaning of it? Or is the best option to take it at face value? That's what I have chosen to believe. Your tailor might be rich. My Japanese is easy to understand. Even Japanese reckon the fact.

Off record : doing the Heisig

Talk about coincidences. It happens all the time. Intrigued and inspired by AJATT for a while, faintly discovering at the same time the meaning of the Heisig books, all this wrapped up yesterday by .... nothing less than a presentation of "Les kanjis dans la tête", a translation/adaptation in French of the James Heisig's book by Yves Maniette. Yves is a member of Freelance France Japon, a professional social network I launched about a year ago. The presentation took place in Tokyo as part of the monthly meeting schedule. The story of how Prof. Heisig put shame on the Japanese learning didtatorship of didacticless didactics by learning the meaning of kanji in no time is recorded enough over the net. I haven't learned using the Heisig. I only but recently learned about the book and the approach. Since yesterday, I am the owner of the French version of that book, courtesy to Yves Maniette. In a way, it is mind blowing but I won't go into doubt mode and scorn at that approach. With close to 30 years in contact with Japanese and Japan, I do not qualify for a fresh view at what is set on the top priority list of what beginners should start learning Japanese with. I just picked up this from the English introduction:

the course is intended not only for beginners,
but also for more advanced students looking for some way to systematize what
they already know and gain relief from the constant frustration of forgetting
how to write the characters.

Forgetting how to write kanji has been on my side ever since then. It know comes clear to me that there was no systematic, didactic approach at the university besides sweating on filling up notebooks after notebooks of kanji. I did my share. Enthusiasm was the burning fuel and there no shortage of it. Immersion was minimal, a poster of kana bought at Smith's in London pasted on the wall in Paris, and rare books religiously lined up on the shelves that were protuding with "mysterious" kanji. Heisig is like AJATT yet another nail in the coffin of that "mysterious" shroud. It also tells a story that holders of the mysteries are not the best qualified to unveil those, for the mere reason that the very shroud make them holders of power and distinction. Why would you tell the world that there is no god, the scripture only asking for dedication to be decrypted? Although I am not linked to China, the very same thing is happening with Chinese. More and more non-Chinese not only learn Chinese but reach a level of practical usage competence of it. Exoticism is receding, to some extent, back to the dark age where it belongs. For sure, a new mysticism is built on top the blanked space, the cool mysticism. But at least, it doesn't pretend to be the exclusive territory of a few coopted bards.

The last wall to keep these modern warriors at bay from the academic fortresses is to scorn there youngish level of competence at best. Yeah, they glee at watching dumbo drama and anime, but they can't read the Genji Monogatari unless it comes in manga format. It is a hopeless battle. The academics will go on holding their conferences like any other social network.

I am more interested in the question of how these learners speaking Japanese much in the way they do on TV, that coolness I don't know nor do I care about, how will they evolve and grow? You don't learn while already a grown-up a language starting with baby books. So you miss growing the language, and at least in university, you learn a grown-up, intellectual language aiming at the perfection native may not on average possess.

This question is no trifle and turn a very interesting subject of sociolinguistics in the coming years.

Is there an interpret?

Meetings after meetings. No routine but after the second presentation, you know much better what to expect. I expect incomprehension. Business cards exchange. I come last. My card doesn't look as those from my clients, because I don't belong. I tell my name, I tell my role. We sit down. when I have my notebook and gears out of my bag, the senior individual on their side inquires aloud : "where is the interpreter?"

Reading aloud, does it help? Oui

I have been promoting reading aloud as a tool for higher level language acquisition, better articulation, pronunciation and increased confidence. But does it work? In liaison interpreting, after doing it myself quite intensively for a few weeks, and having had a session today, I would certainly answer with a frank and unbiased yes, it does. To what extend and at what level? That's what I want to focus on in the coming days.

Headset display for CAI to be released in 2015

This inspired that. Speech keywords and phrases chunk detection (speech to text) with instant translation beamed over headset display for computer aided interpretation. In a shop close to you circa 2015.

We didn't expect this much traffic

"We didn't expect this much traffic," Oya said, adding that a significant amount of hits were from overseas.

What a surprise! A web site of translated legal texts featuring an English-Japanese legal dictionary getting traffic, and from nowhere else but overseas! I can't believe it! What a surprise! I shall faint, amazed, stunned, walled, floored, bewildered! Oh, well ...

Tech wave

The wave of technology is upon us. Google Translator Toolkit will have tremendous negative effect in the profession, the human being a mere checker of the machine output. On the interpretation front, I just read a promotional article about the use of a remote HD simultaneous system during some conference at Hosei University. This does not reduce the role of the interpreter to a mere checker though. To a large extent, in the case of translation at least, in non-critical situations, approximate rendering will suffice. Or said differently, the tolerance to approximate translation will grow as a pandemic. The professional amateur will dominate. Everything else that require precision will be niched out. That's probably where satisfaction in personal professional development may be for a while.

Fun is not a given

I am marathon reading aloud Nikkei BP content these days, aloud or whispering, switching between TechOn! articles and Nikkei Business. TechOn! articles are factual, not bland but not tasty either. Style doesn't matter here much but not in the long run. I can find interest in the stories from a factual point of view a well as language structure point of view. It both matters. I am not strictly on the linguistic side, and to say the truth, I have never been feeling so much away form linguistic matters. The liaison interpreter is an agent of communication, but more than often a consultant on the spot, not a grammatical wizard. TechOn! is OK but Nikkei BP is not. Especially the so-called interviews. I write "so-called" because they don't feel like face to face interviews. What's worse is the content. Dwindling discourses stuffed with platitudes. One interviewee I just read is Standards & Poor vice-president, endlessly circumvoluting around BCP. The reading aloud makes for a good exercise. But you have to think about what you read, just like when practicing shadowing. You must take extra care not start parroting while thinking about what to fix for dinner. Therefore you must think about what you read. That's where the meaning of things and life clash onto the "sense critique". Oh, my! These texts, from a meaning point of view, are too much of the time simply, absolutely dreadfully boring. I just left a comment over Nikkei BP I bet they won't publish, that the whole story on BPC could have been wrapped up in a single page as the points raised were nowhere more than three bland arguments. Well, sure, it's the Nikkei BP, not .... hummm .... not ... what, by the way? I can't come with an example in Japanese. OK, it's the Nikkei BP and the readers are not philosophers. But this said, platitude is not only endemic in those writings; the length of it, sameness and redundancy are dosed at a terribly high level. It sounds like daily life conversation. That's why the magazine sells. So what do you do without the fun factor when you do have to read such crap? I am at loss for a good advice besides hoping for better, more intelligent content to be found somewhere else.

Vocab on a roll

I won't register and pay for VocabSushi, but it's an interesting service and a big hint at the future : vocabulary learning in context with audio and examples pulled out of articles online, and a set of tailoring functions to ones need. Heavy localization would be needed for the Japanese market where learners have been raised from day 1 to fear learning English with and in and out of English only. Advanced level books on English in this country are each time a proof of how bizarre this attachment to English as seen from the Japanese deforming lens can be. In order to extend scope of buyers, advanced learners books are as much larded with Japanese, including translation of anything, as beginners book. But VocaSushi turned into a comparative service, bilingual on purpose - Japanese and English, etc, with parallel extracts of contextual content in both languages could be an interesting value proposal.

1000 hours marathon

ALC's training manuals have been tagged with above average prices. And for what I have seen so far in bookshops, their offerings do not impress.

I love the 1000 hours listening marathon. They sell the service for hefty price. JPY24 000. You could buy a nice iPod with plenty of memory for the same price and stuff it and your ears with free for all English podcasts. Of course, podcasts do not come with translations, word lists, definition, never endings explanations, useless exercises and the likes, but it's bette to keep their customer unaware that in order to listen 1000 hours, what you need to do first is to listen for 1000 hours. Parallel chores like reading will progressively take care of the rest with occasional lateral steps to consult dictionaries.

If you already own an MP3 player, the obvious thing to do is not to buy that expensive training set but start listening on your own. The next thing you should that the books won't give you is to look for encouragement and solace by reading and maybe participating to online forums populated with people like you doing the same thing exchange ideas and cheers. You'll save a bunch and progress more.

And as a parallel challenge, you should jump into the 1000 hours of read aloud training. Yes sir. Don't look for less, one hour a day - that's a long, tedious exercise, very physical, but you will be glad at the progress you will achieve, on your own.

Why are there so few non-Japanese interpreters of Japanese?

Some perspective first : all language pairs with Japanese are not made equal. The Japanese-Chinese pair as well as other Asian languages pairing may tell a different story, because the historical perspectives are so different. My perception is heavily biased by Western concerns and various affects that nurture the questioning. The Summer Intensive Interpreter Training program at the University of Hawaii as well as other programs in others countries have been showing (no link) pictures of students in the classroom and other bits of information that suggest an absolute majority, if not all students are Japanese. In the West at least, and despite the steam loss of Japanese studies, the tantamount interest for modern popular Japanese culture and the number of fluent speakers have not translated into any visibility of non-Japanese interpreters. Someone gave me a plain and clear answer to that matter of fact : you must be so much dedicated (that only Japanese nationals can do it).

It makes sense I must reckon. If you take the example of English in compulsory schooling, the methods and results are appallingly bad in Japan and do not make for a hotbed of language specialists breeding. One could argue that the very fact that language teaching at school level is so inefficient that it generates among some learners tremendous greed to catch up and beyond in later years. The gender factor is also essential, high level language acquisition for females being a way to exit to some extend the cramped macho environment/

The English language massive industry keeps the burning coal red on the shame of not being able to speak English with incentives ever renewed to start again. The obsessiveness - to some extend - and the pavlovian reaction at ones incompetence at foreign languages, all those shaming factors are good for language business. They do fuel among some individuals the crave to excel, and excel some do indeed.

Then, does it mean that on the Western side, no such factors are strong enough to nurture a hotbed for breeding local specialists? I believe the answer is yes, the conditions are a factor of sterilization. Of course the cross-cultural communication mantra would frown at the very questioning of why things are the way they are. I don't think holders of cross-cultural communication are qualified to tell anything about it though.

Debriefing

It's one thing to advocate this or that half-backed method for preparation. It's another step forward to try and apply some by oneself. Except for a few minutes a day before the latest OPI session, I had a look through the four pages covering the industry pertaining to the session subject on that 業界地図 book. I did find serendipity with an article, out of pure chance therefore, on TechOn in English. TechOn is one of the NikkeiBP online portal. It's a see, nay, a tsunami of info accessible for free. The challenge is as with everything else to make sense of the overall topography of the wealth available. Besides these trespassings, I waited one hour before the call to prepare for the challenge. A subject that is the name of a huge industry, and nothing else to navigate in the ocean of anxious preparation. A new look at 業界地図, quick looks at some market research indexes, a chance encounter with a video about a service that would end up in effect pop up in the discussion, et voila.
The inquirer's first question sounded like a big slap in the head, going right away into specific questions not devoid of technical hints and features. I was lucky that the Japanese side could understand English but was not confident enough to answer in English. It was a tremendous help to start with. In the end, it was one of a kind of a very dense, tough OPI session, but the preparation was pretty much centered around the real meat of the discussion. I don't think however calling luck or chance as the major factor to be of any help next time. Because there will be a next time for sure as clients in their majority can't figure out what's the fuss with getting ready for the interpreter. "You speak the language, don't you?", is not only here to stay outside the booth market, it is here to grow. Anticipation is key here and every other solitary effort must be focused on anticipating what will be the conversation's focus, based the capacity to quickly get the big picture of a specific industry, and what within that industry currently matters from the point of view of the inquirer. Therefore, the interpreter must virtually don the shoes of the inquirer and take bets at what she may be interested to hear about first and foremost. Metadata on industrial things, content that give the big picture, simple charts that broadly answer to what, who, where, when, with whom, are essential helpers in the process of preparation in the fog. Luckily enough, there are in Japan at least quite a lot of content that helps navigating the maze to get to the big picture. I don't know of anything equivalent to a 業界地図, be it in English or French. From now on, everything that spells and tells "big picture" is an essential target of preparation under constraints of time and resources.

Business OPI 101

Yes, I know, this is turning redundant, but for whom this blog is written after all? Myself, and the accidental reader.

I see incremental progress in understanding what to do for preparation when under constraints.

Type of constraints over OPI?

1. Time
2. Lack of input

1. Time

This refers as much as the time allowed to prepare as to the fact that you don't get paid to prepare and - in my case - you never know if the subject will pop up again anytime soon and whether it is good on the ROI to invest more time = money. This approach is also put under constrained by the fact that you care about your professionalism and how you are perceived. The power to be don't have a clue about what it is involved with business OPI. They use Google Translate and think it has a brain. They think you a human dictionary. They are expecting one day the machine to get more accurate and especially cheaper than you are. If you say no, they will always find another patty flipper to do it for less. But, this is Japan and I don't know how it fares outside this galaxy.

2. Lack of input

It may comes down to confidentiality so you don't get any clue besides the subject title. It may also be that the caller just think that you are a human dictionary and that speaking the language is all what you need to be able to flip flap the communication crepe at a snap of the fingers. Or it's a mix of all this and the result of coffee being served in less than 40 seconds following order.

Add this to your method. For the sake of confidentiality, the subject at stake has been replaced by a different subject that could turn to pop up next time for ral. But the approach is the same.

You won't spend more than an hour on ..... "Credit cards and e-Money industry in Japan".

I know, you didn't have this for breakfast lately. Just like me.

But, but lucky you! You are in Japan. Online content may be so, so, but books can shine, especially when it comes to getting an overview of some industry. There are such good books on many industries you can think about. But rather than invest in a specific book, you noticed and perused at the bookstore the latest version of 2009年版図解革命！業界地図. Yes, a book formated industry map. It's not new. It's refreshed each year and there are other contenders in the same arena. It cost ¥1000, only. It's metaknowledge close to perfection. So you go the two page concept map like paper display and you get all the players name and basic financial figures with a brief who's done what recently. It's brilliant. You have all the nasty names at hand that will probably pop up during the discussion. You read the map, read everything added, get a picture of the big picture. Next you go to Wikipedia, check for the page on that industry, read the English version and the Japanese version. If you cannot find a JP version (chances are you will find an English version at least), you jump to news articles, maybe find something that gives you an overview for nada except your time. Add to this a scan of the recent news to see what is big and making noise. You have 5 minutes left for a prayer that the subject will not be something arcane, or veered toward an unexpected unrelated (through a straight line) niche subject. Remember, they didn't give you a list of questions or anything that spells guideline. You did the best you could in one our. You should feel proud, whatever happen. Now, the phone is ringing. Go ahead Sam.

Stress

Found this WSJ article dated April 1st about OPI and stress. Very much worth the read although the ending does not provide solace at all.

It nicely fits with the idea I have had fleeting around lately that in Japan where "interpretation" is a public affair, a theme dealt with in standard media and a segment of the language teaching industry, the whole propaganda of the job is set in a limelight Disneyesque landscape of encountering with world personalities basking in goodwill and talk of enhanced international understanding. As usual, reality is multifarious and complex.

記事トレ！ when second hand

I bumped onto this book the other day at Sanseido. 記事トレ！It's a business self-help book and I cringe at business self-help books. But the intro message stroke a chord. It was not a lame "How to read the Nikkei newspaper" but "how to make the best out of it". The book is about visual thinking strategy using Nikkei articles in order to scoop insight and business idea. But it is also in a sense a way at scanning articles that might be interesting for .... sight translation!

But no, I won't shell out ¥1400 for that thin flimsy cheap print book. The second hand market is already open at Amazon.co.jp and my max bid is 500 yens. Whatever it is, the value proposition of how to make the best usage of ... is a potent one, especially when you think about the dire situation of newspaper, elsewhere as in Japan.