Translation Preamble
I’ve owned this book for nearly 25 years, and only recently do I feel that machine translation has advanced to a standard where I’m comfortable using it as a basis to translate the text reliably into English.
I do not speak Japanese. I’ve translated this book using a combination of online tools and manual edits for clarity. It is possible I’ve misrepresented something that was said or unintentionally changed the tone of the dialogue. But overall, I think the results are perfectly enjoyable and enlightening.
I found Google translate reliable for what is a verbose text, containing a significant number of technical and cultural references. I did cross reference its output with LLM tooling, but I found the latter has a tendency to hallucinate information not present in the source material, despite producing more fluid prose. Therefore, I mostly used the former as a basis, before reworking some sections for readability.
I’ve removed small portions of text that were either repetitive or nonsensical after translation.
Personal editorial comments are [shown like this] and are not present in the original text.
Due to the more advanced layout of the original book, some footnotes may not appear in exactly the place they first appeared.
A PDF of the original book can be found here.
If you republish elements of this translation, please do post a credit back to this blog.
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