Hey all! I don't know a better way to get in touch with people than here, so I hope people will see this. Anyway, I noticed a lot of judges from abroad come to Japan to judge tournaments here, but since the players occasionally have difficulty with English, judge calls are not as easily resolved as they could be due to the language barrier. So I've created some flashcards using the flashcard application Anki for foreign judges who want to learn some terminology to help judge in Japan. It's currently being hosted on my Google Drive:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B3-thilnhzscSzdmUmZQajlRbms

Special thanks to Kaoru Yonemura whose Japanese IPG translation I used as a basis for the IPG-related sections, and to Naoaki Umesaki who provided me with some of the knowledge I used to fill in holes in various places.

I tried to keep the card number low and the words very general for the first release, covering only the most common things that tend to come up. If anyone would like to see something additional, please shoot me a message and I'll see what I can do. Of course, as these are flashcards, I can't provide entire conversation scripts, but if there's a particular word or phrase that you think is glaringly absent, by all means let me know.

Note that this project was done without the foreknowledge of anyone in the Japanese judge community entirely by me (thus far, although if anyone else would like to contribute by all means go nuts), and I take sole responsibility for it. If I screwed up anything, it's my own fault :)

Edited Lyle Waldman (Dec. 4, 2015 05:30:54 PM)

Awesome resource! Hoping to come over to japan next November for the GP and this will be a very big help.

If language is the only problem,

then you can always bring something like a phone with internet for use as a translator plus look cards up in English.

–John

Edited john bai (Dec. 5, 2015 11:59:47 AM)

Originally posted by john bai:

If language is the only problem,

then you can always bring something like a phone with internet for use as a translator plus look cards up in English.

–John

That is not always feasible for a few reasons:

1) Wifi in Japan is few and far between, and tends not to exist at GP sites. Additionally, it is nontrivially expensive and arduous to arrange a data sim for a weekend, and is probably not worth doing if you're coming to judge.

2) Japanese uses a different text than most foreign judges are used to (most foreign judges coming from places which use Roman script; this covers almost all European and Western countries), and hence in addition to data the judge would need to install a Japanese text package on their phone.

3) Asking a player “please write your question into my phone” is pretty poor customer service.

4) Because Magic has a lot of game specific jargon, the translation may not always be accurate.

5) The most important issue, not all judges have smart phones. It seems weird to say in 2015, but some people still use phones from the 90s (or have no phones at all). Strange but true =p

Edited Lyle Waldman (Dec. 5, 2015 04:11:21 PM)

Originally posted by Lyle Waldman:

4) Because Magic has a lot of game specific jargon, the translation may not always be accurate.

This is very important to be aware of. A significant portion of the Comprehensive Rules (plus good chunks of the MTR and IPG) are not machine translatable due to some renaming and translation decisions to make them readable to the general Japanese person. While you could probably get away with basic judge calls with translation software, anything terminology-specific is somewhat at risk if you aren't going through a human translator.

Awesome, thanks! Would it be possible to have the Japanese part additionally in hiragana/katakana?

Thanks!

Christian

These flashcards have been taken down. Apparently none of the people who used them found them useful, or at least not useful enough to let me know that they are relevant, so I've decided to discontinue them. The link in the OP is broken.

@Christian: Sorry, I just saw your post now.