Found in Translation

Take Me Out to the Ball Game
Many young American boys dream of growing up to be baseball stars. Eleven-
year-old Kenji Nimura brought those aspirations with him when he moved to
Los Angeles from Japan. Nimura’s dream was specific. He wouldn’t play for
just any team. It had to be with his team. The Los Angeles Dodgers.
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Unfortunately for most aspiring athletes, reality eventually reorders those
visions of sporting greatness. And though he played his heart out at his mostly
Latino school in West Los Angeles, Nimura, too, finally realized that he wasn’t
even close to being good enough to play baseball professionally. But it took a
bit longer to recognize that during those many years on and around the
ballpark, he had picked up a skill that would one day make it possible to live
that dream. What was this skill? His fluency in three languages: Japanese,
Spanish, and English. Nimura was first hired as the interpreter for the
Dodgers’ Japanese superstar pitcher Hiroki Kuroda, but his unique

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combination of languages quickly made him the go-to guy for the many
Spanish-speaking players on the team too.
Because baseball came to Japan from the United States, many of the terms
are easily recognizable to English speakers as transliterations into Japanese
from English. This is true for terms like
(homuran) for “home run,”
(boru) for “ball,” and
(bantu) for “bunt.” Others are also
transliterations but more difficult to recognize. For instance,
(kyacchiboru) is “to play catch.” If you say it aloud a couple of times you
might recognize its origin as “catch a ball.” And if you are a real baseball buff
(or a very lucky guesser), you might be able to make out
(gettsu) as
“get two” or “double play.”
The perks of Nimura’s job are not just linguistic in nature. Consider the fact
that pitcher Ramon Troncoso invited Nimura to be the best man at his wedding.
And Manny Ramirez (yes, that Manny Ramirez) insisted that Nimura be
counted as part of the team when it came to signing baseballs. “Those are my
favorite moments,” Nimura says. Indeed, many young kids would say that
those moments are the stuff of dreams.
Pe rfe ct Pitch
In 2009, a mistranslation cost Cuba the use of two of its pitchers at the World Baseball Classic in an
elimination game against Mexico. The baseball tournament had guidelines for the limits of individual
pitchers, but the guidelines were mistranslated from English into Spanish. Instead of indicating that no
reliever could pitch the day after he had thrown thirty or more pitches (treinta o más), the translation
in Spanish said more than thirty pitches (más que trienta). As a result, the Cuban manager removed
two relievers after they had delivered exactly thirty pitches, wanting to keep them available to pitch
the next day. Unfortunately, they were in fact ineligible to pitch—and none of the other teams had
relied on the mistranslated text aside from Cuba.