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Translations for the Japanese

One of the participants in the Essential Educator workshop was Yumi Okoso, better known in Japan by her pen name – Nanako Oba. Yumi is a very well known childbirth educator and birth activist in Japan and quite a TV personality as well. She heads the Birth-Sense Institute, a private consultancy that provides classes and workshops for parents.

In addition, Yumi has set up the Japan Birthing Association, an alliance of midwives, doctors, educators and parents interested in promoting natural childbirth throughout Japan. The Association offers training courses for educators who work with children in schools, offer baby massage courses for new mothers and pre conception programs for couples. They also train educators for pregnancy programs for parents.

As the author of 10 books and the mother of five children (all natural births), Nanako (as she is known to her TV audience) is a frequent commentator in the media, promoting midwifery and natural births.

While she was in Sydney, Yumi and I met with Yoko Yuille who is translating on my books Preparing for Birth: Mothers and Preparing for Birth: Fathers into Japanese. Yoko is a Trainer in NLP, and is herself the author of a book on this subject. The plan is to have my books released in Japan by December, and they will be sold in department stores, classes and through midwives in much the same way as they are sold here. Two of my books The Midwife Companion and Empowering Women are already available in Japanese and are selling well.

We are also looking at ways of translating some of the individual activities in The Essential Educator kits into Japanese. A publishing house in Japan that specialises in medical publications is keen to produce some materials and workshops for those interested in childbirth education and the Kit elements would appear to be ideal. This will be our next project in 2008.

Posted by andrea at October 21, 2007 07:47 AM