Way back in January, Frog-Kun wrote a post about supporting the English light novel industry. In that article, he found out about a contest held back in December by Impress Quick-Books, a JP publisher who teamed up with crowd-funding translation company Conyac. With a number of translators on the case, Alice’s Tale (1st), Whether It Rains or Shines Tomorrow (2nd), and The Akiba Labyrinth (3rd) were published in English. So, curious about what Conyac is, I reached out to the company and was able to exchange some questions with Naoki Yamada, who happens to be the CEO. There are some edits to this piece for clarification.
Organization ASG: What would you say Conyac’s all about since you started it?
Naoki Yamada: We aim to make Conyac a service that overcomes communication and cultural gaps.
OASG: What’s been Conyac’s biggest challenge so far?
Naoki: The language barrier is much bigger thing than people usually think. There are lots of things behind language such as cultural gap, geographic gap, religion and so forth. Conyac’s biggest challenge is to overcoming those big gaps.
OASG: How did the opportunity to work with Impress Quickbooks come about?
Naoki: We approached them last year.
OASG: How has it been working for Impress Quickbooks, and what makes the LN’s that were in the contest a good read and worth translating?
Naoki: It was a good experience to work on the LNs as it has a lot of potential in the English book market especially as an e-book.
OASG: Do you see an opportunity to tackle the LN/game market a bit more in the next few years?
Naoki: Yes, especially because Japanese Anime/LN/Game industry is getting bigger and will expand more to oversea market in the the near future.
OASG: You say that the Japanese anime/LN/game market will expand overseas. Have you spoken to companies that have expressed interest to expand overseas or is this just your prediction based on recent products coming to places like the US or Europe?
Naoki: We have lots of clients doing translation for the games and anime who expand their product to Asia and Europe.
OASG: Why do you think light novels have gained such a wide audience that now seems to be growing in other markets?
I’m not sure about it, but I think it is because it is “light” to read for people’s free time.
OASG: How has Conyac changed since it was founded — from what it translates, translation rates, exposure, etc?
Naoki: We’ve been providing consumers first and now we provide our translation mainly to business entities. We also shifted our business focus from just translation to a wide variety of tasks like writing articles, researches and more.
OASG: What would you say to people who are unsure about Conyac’s goals regarding translations?
Naoki: Our goal is to provide a service that people can overcome the language barrier.
OASG: Finally, what are the goals for the service in 2015?
Naoki: A larger bilingual user base and larger customer base.
