Currently I translate my own book written in Japanese, to English. This book is on D-branes in string theory, and the Japanese version was published in 2006. The book is for undergraduates, so includes not many equations. I tried to convey a flavor of fronteer researches on string theory and D-branes. Fortunately I got an offer from a publishing company for an English version of the book, so I am translating the book with my wife. I hope we can finish this translation in a month or so, so that the English version is published before the main results of LHC will come out.
As you can easily guess, it is very hard to work on translation. For me, it was much easier to write the book itself. Translation is a kind of tedious work, I need to choose terms which do not spoil the original sentences… So I decided to work on it only in trains. Everyday I commute by trains for almost one hour or so, and I can have a seat in the trains, although I live in the middle of Tokyo city. As you may know, Tokyo is a notorious place for the population, and every train is quite packed with people. However, fortunately, in my trains I can find only few people, as the direction of my commuting is opposite to the direction of most of Tokyo people. So I open my laptop every day in the train and start working on my translation, for at least 30 minutes. I hope you may be interested in the English version of my book in which the notion of D-branes and string theory is given, at the education level of graduate students.
