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"Everything has been thought of before,
but the problem is to think of it again."
Goethe
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BRUCE HOLCOMBE
Profile
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Bruce Holcombe is one of the very few experienced non-Japanese simultaneous interpreters working between Japanese and English. His career as an interpreter took off in 1980 when he was chosen by the Australian government as the first recipient of a national scholarship award to train as a conference interpreter at the Simul Academy in Tokyo.
In the intervening years Mr. Holcombe has interpreted for countless international conferences, business negotiations, meetings between political leaders, media broadcasts, press conferences and lectures by Nobel prizewinners, academics and other prominent figures in Japan. As Japan has globalized, increasingly he has been sought to interpret for depositions and court hearings in major cross-border intellectual property cases and other litigation, as well as M & A and joint venture negotiations.
Mr. Holcombe founded his company (then called Lexis) in 1985. For over two decades this Tokyo-based firm has been a niche provider of high quality languages services specializing in finance, law, and medicine for governments, international law offices, financial institutions and multinational corporations.
For fifteen years from 1986 Mr. Holcombe was the senior advisor in Japan to the State of Tasmania and has consulted for a number of large foreign corporations on entering the Japanese market and doing business in Japan.
Mr. Holcombe has served on Tokyo Metropolitan Government committees and advised regional governments. He is a frequent public speaker and has written a regular column in Japanese for the Nikkei Shimbun, Japan’s national business daily, for the past eight years. He has also been featured by the BBC in a series on Japanese culture and language.
Mr. Holcombe is multilingual and initially taught linguistics at Sydney’s Macquarie University in the late seventies. He holds a BA (Honours) from Sydney University majoring in Indonesian, and an MA (Honours) degree in Japanese linguistics from Macquarie University. He first came to Japan as a research student in 1973 and has studied at Keio University, the Tokyo University of Foreign Languages and the National Language Research Institute.
He is married with four children and is an avid vegetable gardener and enthusiastic devotee of the grape. He is an obsessive collector of newspaper clippings, linguaphile, bookworm, filmgoer, music lover of catholic taste, and horse racing aficionado. For commentary and notes on some of these “passions” try www.holcombe.jp and click through to the Bh site.
December, 2005
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