Allen Hunter at Royal Albert Hall

For 21 years now, my mother has been saying that I do translation to finance my music habit. At 43, I was beginning to fear that she was right.

I started translating Japanese technical documents in 1984 almost by accident. My new wife and I had moved to the San Francisco Bay Area with a carload of our belongings and some vague idea that there would be work for us both. She landed a job selling pharmaceuticals and I landed a job working the night shift at a 7-11 in Redwood City. Not exactly where I had expected to be, but I had plans.

Cut to: me brazenly riding my skateboard up to the offices of Leo Kanner & Associates there in Redwood City, completing a sample translation, and beginning my career as a technical J-E translator.

I’ve since worked for several agencies and a handful of my own clients, and have maintained as full a translating schedule as I’ve wanted. I have done translations in a wide variety of fields and always welcome a challenge. I think my favorite field has become microlithography and my least favorite was mathematical modeling of lamellar flows (still have nightmares…).

Which takes us back to my mother’s comment.

I’ve always maintained that I translated for a living and played music to keep my sanity. I’m a normally gregarious fellow, and the long, solitary hours required by the craft tended to drive me little crazy. All work and no play…

Raised in a very musical household, I have sung and played musical instruments of one kind or another since I was 4 or 5 years old. I started playing the bass when I was 13 and began playing professionally at age 19. Since then I’ve played mostly in local or regional bands at night and on weekends, often playing 4 or 5 nights a week. Playing with other musicians for an audience provides the creative and social outlets that I need to be able to go back to work the next day.

As with my translation career, I’ve always welcomed a challenge and enjoy playing different types of music. Over the years, I’ve played in rock, punk, blues, soul, rockabilly, pop, jazz, and latin bands. Some of these bands won local awards, and some gained a fair amount of regional attention, playing regularly at clubs and major festivals in the Pacific Northwest. I’ve also enjoyed a fairly full recording career, appearing on my own albums and as a studio bassist on other’s work and in commercial projects.

In one of my current bands, James Low & The Wreck (www.jameslow.net), I play a sort of roots-rock akin to Tom Petty & The Heartbreakers or Neil Young & Crazy Horse. It was through the guitarist in that band that I wound up sitting here at LAX, writing this bio, having just completed a 6-month world tour with the internationally known act, Eels (www.eelstheband.com).

During this tour, I’ve played 40 dates in Europe, 20 in the US, and 4 in Australia/NZ. I’ve appeared on the Carson Daly, Craig Ferguson, David Letterman, and Jools Holland TV shows. I’ve been on the world-famous “Morning Comes Ecclectic” radio show on LA’s KCRW. And to cap it all, I played to a sold-out audience at London’s Royal Albert Hall.

Amazingly, while on tour I actually do my “job” for only about 5 hours a day, including a 2 hour sound check and 2 hour performance. This allowed me a lot of “down-time,” during which I was also able to keep my hand in the translation business.

This presented its own unique challenges. When I began translating 21 years ago, I composed my drafts in longhand on a legal pad and then typed the final copy on an IBM Selectric, surrounded by my Nelson’s, the Green Goddess, and any other glossaries and dictionaries required for the job: not a very travel-friendly proposition. Today, I can do all my research and word-lookup on the Internet from my slim PowerBook G4, which is all well and good as long as there is Internet available. Each day and each new city found me piling off the tour bus, computer in hand, trying to find a WiFi connection. Sometimes I wasn’t able to get online until we made it to our hotel, and even then it was often a difficult and expensive proposition getting hooked up.

I think that by the end of my 6 months, I finally had figured it all out, but not without testing the limits of some clients’ patience and losing a fair amount of sleep and hair from regular pulling.

I’ve been well compensated as a musician on this tour, to the extent that I could have passed on the translation work, but I really wanted to keep my translating “chops” fresh and to maintain my agency relationships.

I guess for a moment my mom and I were both right. I don’t do either to support the other. I actually am both a translator and a musician because I love them both. All in all, not a bad life…

Allen lives, works, and plays with his 17-year-old son Zachary (also a bassist) in his home-town of Portland, Oregon.