Professor Jim Breen

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Jim will need no introduction to subscribers to the Honyaku mailing list. He's had a life-long interest in Japan and all things Japanese. He's spent much of his professional career working on Japanese information technology systems and is well known for the contribution he and his team at Monash University have made to constructing dictionaries and software many of us use daily in our translations to and from Japanese.

He says about himself:

 

After a working life in technical computing and telecommunications, spent in telcos, the Defence Ministry, a consultancy and finally a university, I retired four years ago so I could indulge myself in my main hobby, which is Japanese dictionaries.

Why Japanese? I blame my wife, who is a music teacher working in the Suzuki Method, and

who made us move to Japan in 1981 (briefly) so she could study there. Things have never been the same.

Why dictionaries? In 1990 I wanted to experiment with manipulating Japanese text in software, and a writing a dictionary program seemed an interesting thing to do. Of course, I needed a dictionary on file too, so I began compiling one. 17 years later I haven’t stopped; in fact I ended up compiling several along the way.