Writing email for Sister City Music Festival Exchange

[Mei9Karai]

I’m trying to facilitate a cultural exchange between my town and our Japanese sister city. Both places host annual music festivals, and I have local contacts at our lp radio station and the festival here. I’d love to get recordings of their music fest broadcast in our town and vice versa. I ran it by the city’s Special Programs director, she loved it, and reached out to her contact, but hasn’t heard anything back in a few days. I’d like to just email the festival and city directly (which she endorsed), but can’t be sure I’ll get an English speaker on the other end, and my Japanese feels a bit too limited to get this idea across lucidly. I’m not expecting anyone to run ongoing translations if I do receive a response, but any help with the initial reach-out would be so very rad. I will be attempting to email them in English (and shitty Japanese?) later today.

Thanks so much and sorry if this is a crummy place to post this!

[daines]

Depending on how comfortable you are, you could try to do a mix of Google translate combined with some form letters found online. The first line or two are likely to be formulaic statements, then a paragraph with your actual context. That’ll keep the potential mistranslations to a minimum.

[Mei9Karai]

Ooh that’s a great idea. I hadn’t thought about form letters, thank you! I do have a draft email I’m slowly working on thanks to Google translate. Maybe I will post it here for y’alls amusement when it’s closer to done.

[Belthazar]

Maybe I will post it here for y’alls amusement when it’s closer to done.

You should certainly do this. Google translate can be… troublesome when it comes to Japanese.

[Mei9Karai]

Oh absolutely. I’ve done some translation between French and English, and can only imagine how bizarre my first attempt at this email in Japanese would read with my limited grammar. Thanks for being willing to look at it!

[Mei9Karai]

I got through to a human and they speak excellent English! This idea is actually moving forward and I’m just prickly with excitement. My original email only had a few sentences in Japanese before resorting to English, but I can’t help but feel like WaniKani gave me some really helpful skills and confidence to even try reaching out in the first place. And that was all before I learned the word 外交 on here. I WK!