These are a set of poems I translated (with much help) from Japanese in 2015 for a project that was funded by a youth arts program where I live. A friend then provided Scots translations, working together with me to strike a balance between all three languages. The project then involved typesetting and printing that work to produce a small book, for which tasks I had decided to use only FOSS software for both budget and proof of concept reasons.

The poems in this selection were, in part, picked for their connections to the natural world and the outside world, as well as simply to provide an interesting selection of poetry by authors whose names are well known but whose work may not be, especially outside of Japan. At some point, I hope to provide some detailed information on each poem and its challenges in translation.

By uploading this to Github, I hope to explain some reasons as to why I think better implementation of vertical text support in FOSS software is necessary and give my own overview (and only my own, from a purely subjective standpoint) of the useability of Open Source tools in traditionally “professional” tasks such as desktop publishing.

I also hope to promote multi-cultural translation and communication, provide some examples of poetry translation from Japanese to English in the hope that someone may find them useful and, if possible, improve the relationship between open source software, translation and multicultural design and media. I would like to note that better support for RTL and vertical text also provides opportunity for interesting and useful design within software GUIs and layout.

As is, there is currently a situation of anyone other than designers working with closed-source software being all but locked out of the ability to easily use what has been and remains such a huge part of their language's visual identity. For the sake of allowing greater compatibility between real-world and software interaction with written language, better support for vertical text is certainly necessary.

I used LibreOffice initially to give myself a clear layout when translating the poems. Then I went into Inkscape to do the typesetting before outputting each page as a pdf using pdftk.

For font design, I used FontForge.

$ pdftk file01.pdf file02.pdf file03.pdf file&c.pdf cat output new_file.pdf

For the English and Scots translations, I used Linden Hill.

For the Japanese poems, I used four fonts: For the kana text, I used a font entirely of my own design, made from scratch – Yue Mincho Kana (now Alba Mincho Kana). For the kanji text, I made two fonts containing only the kanji characters I needed, using Hanazono Mincho as a skeleton to speed up design – HanamoyouMincho and HanamoyouMidashi. Both are named after a poem that I considered using in the colection but eventually decided not to. For the ruby text, I used Gutenberg Labo's GL-Antique.

Created with funding from and thanks to Young Scot and Creative Scotland's Time To Shine fund. Thanks also to 青空文庫 (Aozora Bunko) for providing a space where it's easily possible to find and read Japanese poems online. Lastly, thanks to all those who gave their help, advice, time and energy to helping me produce this.

Scots translations © Kaye McAlpine. English translations © Gregor Wilson.