Translation Standards
For this publication of the English version, the translation was conducted according to the following standards.
1. While proceeding with the basic goal of providing a translation that accurately reflects the original source material, efforts are also being made to employ terms and expressions that will help make the contents more accessible to non-Japanese readers who may not be familiar with specific details of Japanese culture and history, especially those relating to Nagasaki. For this reason, in some instances additional explanatory descriptions have been added to the original source material.
2. To provide a translation that will meet academic standards, material excerpted from other sources will be cited in detail, in as much as this is possible. Excerpts from English publications which were translated into Japanese for use in the source material have been reprinted in the original English whenever possible. For instances when the original publications could not be located, these passages have been translated back into English.
3. All terms are written as they appear in the American lexicon. (The proper noun World War I, for example.)
4. As the source material was published on the sixtieth anniversary of the atomic bombing, expressions such as “”Sixty years ago”, “_ _ years from (the date of publication)” and “_ _ years (to the present day)” were used within. For this translation, such expressions have been revised, so that “The atomic bombing of sixty years ago,” for example, has been replaced with “The atomic bombing of 1945.”
5. Japanese names are written in the order they appear in Japanese, with the surname followed by the given name.
6. Efforts were made to investigate the correct readings for all Japanese personal names, but in cases where confirmation could not be made we have used the readings considered most likely.
7. Italics are used for Japanese nouns that are to be read according to Japanese pronunciation (Nagasaki shisei rokujūgonenshi, for example), and macrons are used as needed for Japanese place names and personal names.