Lost in translation?

I thought I was going to be a translator.

In my junior year of undergrad, I started looking into graduate schools that offered translation/interpretation programs. I was studying in Tokyo at the time and having served as an interpreter many a time for fellow classmates and such, I thought that was what I wanted to do. I wanted to facilitate communication—none of this broken communication that Peters talks about.

I loved language (and still do!). My best friend had gotten into the Sociolinguistics MS program at Georgetown and while linguistics wasn't exactly my thing, I still wanted to work with language. My parents worried about me constantly, wondering how I would make money speaking Japanese. While I worried as well, I didn't worry as much as they did.

I applied to the Monterery Institute of International Studies. My backup was San Francisco State's Japanese Studies MA program. It wasn't until a good two-thirds through the application for Monterey that I realized that this wasn't going to work. That I wasn't at a high enough language level to be even applying and I wasn't totally sure I wanted to be applying in the first place anymore. Least to say, I was rejected. ;)

Popular culture and media had always been an avid hobby of mine, but I had never looked at it than more than that. In my final semester of senior year, I had an extra class available, so I decided to take a class in the Media Studies department, International/Global Media. My professor, Vamsee Juluri (an alumni of our department), really opened my eyes to media studies and communication as disciplines. I had always looked the Media Studies department as a department of fun classes that I would've loved to take in another life, if I hadn't been a Japanese Studies major. But in that class, Professor Juluri showed me that I could easily combine both my love for popular culture and Japan into something that could be taken seriously, something that could be academic. What's more, I came to realize that I had been working in communication all along—writing papers on gender roles in Japanese television dramas or the ways media was employed to create intimacy between pop idols and fans—but had never known it.

I feel like I'm still in the processes of "coming" to communication. Every day I learn more, my horizons expand, and I find myself settling in to what communication is about for me. As for founding fathers of communication to me, I would have to say Koichi Iwabuchi. His works on Asian media flows and transnationalism were the first I encountered when I was still blind and without a clue as to what communication was and I continue to admire the work he and others are doing in bringing Asian media into prominence in the English-speaking academic circles.

Now that I think about it, I suppose I still am a translator. Of sorts. :)