A digitisation of the 1935, revised 30th edition of Japanese in Three Weeks, available to download via the Internet Archive.

A fantastic resource for translators who work with older material, it contains a wealth of contemporary phrases and how they were translated between English and Japanese. Illustrations throughout, including sentence diagramming and red text for emphasis. Gained some attention when I tweeted about it back in July.

It makes a strong case for gathering our courage and going for those more interpretive translations, for example ‘I begin to see the light’ being translated into the archaic but simple ‘sukoshi wakari dashi-ta’ (sic), or ‘I am tired to death’ becoming the much less fatal ‘sukkari yowatta’ (see page 117 below).

The book is very small and the copy I have is not in very good condition, so I apologise in advance that some pages are a bit warped and wonky with age and deteriorating binding, there wasn’t really much I could do about that short of skinning the book, and I really didn’t want to flay the poor thing – so wonky it is!