This article examines the peculiar linguistic expressions used by the characters Anya and Yor in the manga SPY x FAMILY by Tatsuya Endo from the perspective of character language and character archetypes, and investigates how they are expressed in the translated English version. Anya the trickster, a young telepath, uses a peculiar form of baby talk, whereas the story’s shapeshifter Yor, a professional assassin in disguise, speaks with excessive politeness. Although the English version is only partially successful in reproducing Anya’s unique mix of toddler-like pronunciation and occasional adult masculine expressions, it represents Yor’s consistent and overly polite expressions rather effectively.

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In the field of Translation Studies, humor is considered to be one of the most challenging aspects of interlingual translation, its ephemeral essence often being difficult to preserve in another language—in particular if the languages in question are as dissimilar as English and Japanese. This study focuses on Junko Nishimura’s Japanese translation of Diana Wynne Jones’s British fantasy novel Howl’s Moving Castle (1986), demonstrating how the language-bound and culture-specific humor of the original text underwent a circumspect re-rendering to conform to Japanese language conventions and target-readership expectations. The paper pursues the double objective of widening the scope of research into the Japanese translations of Diana Wynne Jones’s compositions and initiating a more constructive discussion of why “verbal humour travels badly” (Chiaro, 2010, p. 1) across Anglophone and Japanese cultures. A discussion of linguistic and cultural differences followed by an analysis of Jones’s humor characteristics constitute the theoretical part of the study, while an empirical analysis of the translation methods used by Nishimura to render different comical devices of the novel comprises the practical part.

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The reception of Chinese vernacular novels (hakuwa shōsetsu) via translation and adaptation in early modern Japan exerted a great influence upon the literature of the time, which would later yield some proto-typical translations of Western literary works in the early Meiji era. While the subject has been explored mainly in the disciplines of Japanese and Chinese literature, it has not been studied in translation studies. Polysystem theory (Even-Zohar, 1978) regards translated literature as part of a broad and dynamic system and thus helps elaborate how it occupies a major or minor position in a literary system at a given time. Based on Tokuda’s (1987) acclaimed literary study of the renderings of Chinese vernacular novels, this paper attempts to perform a polysystemic analysis of the translation / adaptation of those novels in the late 17th and the early 18th century in order to add a context-oriented perspective to his text-based research.

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In this paper, we analyzed simultaneous Japanese Sign Language and Japanese interpretation in the academic field. We focused on the parts which did not fully convey the content of the original text due to additions or reductions and clarified how this affected the argument which the lecturer was trying to convey, and the logical structure used in it. As a result, we found that (1) in some interpreters’ translations, essential words and phrases were left out or added that were not delivered in the source text. (2) Some of the additions and reductions were related to the delay of translation. (3) Some parts did not convey the argument as clearly as the lecturer had intended due to the transmission of logical structure such as "consequences."

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This paper aims to clarify the distinctions between the stage translation and film translation of Samuel Beckett’s Happy Days from both interlingual and intersemiotic perspectives. This paper first scrutinizes the interlingual translation of the stage version from English to Japanese as demonstrated through the voices of the actors on the stage, and the intersemiotic translation from the stage directions in the text to nonverbal factors on the stage during a live performance. The paper then focuses on the interlingual translation of the film version in French with Japanese subtitles as well as the intersemiotic translation from the stage directions in the text to nonlinguistic elements on the screen. By comparing the effects of the stage and film versions that were presented in Japan in 2019 from the viewpoints of interlingual and intersemiotic translation, this paper ultimately discloses not only the environmental variance between these media but also Beckett’s vision for the stage, film, and translation.

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This article investigates the translation fidelity in Chinese subtitles of Japanese movies by the frequency of Extralinguistic Cultural References (ECR) translation strategies applied in six Japanese films. The results show that the subtitles of ECRs that are strongly related to the theme of the work tend to be source-oriented while those that are not keywords/phrases of the movie are likely to be target-oriented. The purpose of subtitles is not only to inform the target audience of the story of the film but also to retain the appropriate connection to the foreign culture to allow the audience to enjoy both the foreign culture and the story. In addition, the subtitles of units and dish names show high fidelity towards the source -text. This is partly because spatiotemporal limitations prevent the subtitles from giving much information, and partly because the images on the screen require that they be identical to the subtitles.

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With the dramatic improvements in the accuracy as well as fluency of Machine Translation (MT), teachers and instructors in foreign language education have started discussing how to deal with MT in their classrooms. To the best of our knowledge, no research has extensively investigated the status quo of the use of MT in English language education in Japan. Therefore, our JAITS special interest project conducted a survey targeting English language teachers in universities, high schools and junior high schools. The questionnaire consisted of a wide range of questions, including language teachers’ attitude toward the application of MT in English teaching, teachers’ subjective evaluations on MT translation quality and learners’ performance, and emerging ethical issues concerning MT. Over 130 responses were collected. This report presents the responses from university instructors who teach general education English (N=60).

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Translation is, and always has been, an important pathway for language development. Fostering language innovation is one of the great values of translation, but it is not easy to achieve language innovation in translation, for the introduction of neologisms and new expressions in translation meets with resistance from the target language. The more original they are, the greater resistance they encounter in translation. In order to maintain the possibility of language innovation while sustaining the impact of translation, we need to pay sufficient attention to the translation-resistance of literary language, refraining from “smoothing out” the qualities of the original language in the name of smoothness and fluency. We also need to understand and reconcile “translationese” and “linguistic foreignness”, trying to preserve heterogeneity in lexicon, syntax, narrative, and other aspects of the original work, so as to help translation fulfil its mission of conveying differences, opening up space for language innovation, reproducing the literariness of the original work, and enriching the culture.

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