This article explores the value of incorporating introductory courses aimed at enhancing ‘Translation and Interpreting (TI) Literacy’ into TI Education at the undergraduate level. We propose that offering courses that provide a basic literacy in TI to a wide range of undergraduate students can be a valuable means of both identifying potential students who will go on to pursue professional education in TI as well as fostering individuals who will go on to become effective users of TI services and supporters of TI professionals in a wide range of fields. Student feedback from an undergraduate course designed for the abovementioned purposes seems to point to the value of covering a wide range of concepts and issues in TI practices through a combination of lectures, workshops, exercises and other interactive/participatory methods that allow students to realize the relevance of TI to their own studies, daily lives, and future careers.

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Information explicitation is a popular methodology in interpretation. Studies on this process tend to focus on common language pairs, often including English, but there has never been a research conducted on minority languages such as Thai, Vietnamese, Indonesian, etc. During this study, we collected data about the interpretation from Japanese to Vietnamese and vice versa, identif ied, categorized and evaluated the effectiveness of the information explicitation strategies used in the interpretation process of Japanese - Vietnamese language pair.

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There are two kinds of Sign systems in Japan. One is “simultaneous communication [sim-com]” method, and the other is “Japanese Sign Language, JSL”. Sim-com basically keeps the word order and syntactic structure of Japanese assisted with finger spellings. JSL is a traditional Sign Language in Japan, and has its own word order and syntactic structure. We compared the interpretation of sim-com to Japanese and JSL to Japanese and examined the time delay of interpretation and the ratio of source massage translated into interpreted Japanese. The ratios of source messages were 72 to 100% in sim-com, and 57 to 89% in JSL, and the average time delays were 1.3 and 2.5 sec in sim-com and JSL respectively. These results suggest that JSL interpretation is more difficult than that of sim-com, and that the good interpreters make use of different interpretation strategies which might be suitable and effective for each Sign System.

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In Audiovisual Translation, translator’s notes are seldom used mainly because of spatial and temporal limitations. While this paper will focus on a large amount of use of translator’s notes, especially on culture-specific items, in 『歩歩驚心』, a Chinese TV drama which takes a background of Qing Dynasty. In Functionalist Translation Theory, it is thought that the choice of translation strategies is decided by the intended function (also known as ‘skopos’) of TT(target text)s. Thus in this paper, an analysis will be made on how the translator’s notes are used in the TT and what kind of effects they have brought to it, and then the relationship between the use of translator’s notes and the ‘skopos’ will be explored. Regardless, the heavy usage of notes, especially on culture-specific items, would be seen as a strong position of the translator in cross-cultural communication.

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This article examines how Haruki Murakami—the most widely read contemporary Japanese author in the world today—is translated in the Anglophone world. We suggest that the highly networked world of Haruki Murakami, which transcends literary spaces still largely divided along lines of language and nation state, may be seen as a kind of grand experiment in “contemporary literature”, and that while Japan and the United States are no doubt key centers in the laboratory that operates this experiment, this network comprises diverse “rewriters” across the globe that include translators, editors, agents, designers, critics as well as readers, bringing additional complexity to the question of who we are reading when we are reading Haruki Murakami.

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In recent years, the demand for English subtitles of Japanese films has increased with the increase of Japanese films aimed at overseas markets. However, since English subtitles of Japanese films have not attracted much attention in academic research, only a few investigations have been conducted regarding the translation and translation process of English subtitles. This paper intends to explore factors that influence the translation of English subtitles of Japanese films from the viewpoint of subtitling process and audience. The analysis of translation of culture-specific items (CISs) of the film Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi reveals that more than half of the CISs in the film are ‘standardized’ in English subtitles. This can be attributed to the diversity of audiences of English subtitle s, and to the process of internationalization in localization model. Further research is needed to see if this tendency is applicable to English subtitles of other Japanese films, and to examine factors in the target culture that influence the translation of Japanese films.

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This paper explores “Phrenology” of Chambers’s Information for the People edited and published by W. & R. Chambers and its Japanese translation of “Kossogaku,” one of the volumes of Hyakkazensyo projected and published by the then education ministry of the Meiji government. The purpose of focusing on these texts is to discuss our modern vision toward others from the viewpoint of translation studies. While Japan experienced turbulent modernization after opening her door to the world in the middle of the 19th century, phrenological mindsets prevailed in Japanese society. The translating of “Phrenology” greatly influenced our perspective in various ways, including literary expressions. The author tries to situate the translation text of “Kossogaku” together with its contemporaneous discourse in the context of Japan’s modernization.

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This article deals with the problem of translatability of religious language, taking examples of figurative expressions in the Qur’anic discourse. In the traditional Western rhetoric, metaphor was a species of the figure of word, and was considered as the substitution of proper word into figurative one which has only esthetic effect. But, in the Arabic rhetoric, metaphors are not esthetic but cognitive, and lead to the clarification of the meaning of text. If metaphors come from the substitution of words, in translating it is only necessary to translate the proper meaning which lies behind its figurative meaning. But in the case of cognitive metaphors, translation may become hard task, because those metaphors directly participate in the process of the making-sense of discourse itself. It can be said we are in front of the limit of the translation, and are obliged to devise various ways of translation strategies.

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Indirect Translation (ITr.) which is considered as ‘poor copy of a copy (translation itself)’ seems to be the last choice of translators and readers. However, until present, translations which are indirectly translated from another language(s) apart from the language of source text have been carried out throughout the world. The fact that there exists almost negative criticism about ITr. also implies that ITr. has not been well-studied, including its essence, variations and advantages (if any). Hence, it leads to the need of reconsidering ITr. as a more general and specific nature of translating methods, and investigating more carefully into the topic. This paper, inspired by the idea of Kawada (2008)’s ‘triangulation of cultures’, will first attempt to classify ITr. from the intercultural perspective, then discuss the possibility of ITr. as a kind of tripartite comparison between the source text, the mediating text and the target text through examples of Japanese literary texts translated into Vietnamese.

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Is it appropriate to divide sentences into phrase units when converting languages? This article argues this question basing on data of a Japanese-to-Chinese simultaneous interpreting corpus made by the author, through analyzing from grammatical difference of these two languages and time limit of simultaneous interpreting. At first, the author compares grammatical constructions between Japanese and Chinese by using data from the corpus, and analyzes the impact of word order difference on comprehension and production of simultaneous interpreting. Next, basing on the same corpus, the author analyzes why interpreters are impossible to wait for a whole sentence when working under time limit in cases of simultaneous interpreting, and argues that it is reasonable to divide sentences into phrase units when converting languages. The author concludes that interpreters should divide sentences into phrase units as to comprehend the source language.

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The domestication-foreignization paradigm of translator visibility originally formulated by Lawrence Venuti has come to dominate much translation research. However, much of the discussion relating to the use of this paradigm has historically centred on the subjective nature of the terminology, or even the ideological specificities of the American context in which Venuti produced the paradigm. This article aims to demonstrate that a more fundamental issue with using the visibility paradigm is a tendency to focus on textual analysis at the expense of broader social and contextual details. Using textual analysis to explore the translation work of Haruki Murakami, arguably one of the most visible contemporary translators, the article demonstrates the often contradictory results that can arise from extrapolating translator visibility in this way. It advocates further analysis of celebrity translators’ work for the production of a more sophisticated paradigm of translator visibility, appropriate for a greater number of contexts.

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This study compares the English scripts of the two speeches given by Empress Michiko at the 1998 and 2002 congresses of the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY) with their original Japanese scripts, by focusing on translation shifts. The analysis suggests that the translation shifts observed in the two ST–TT pairs can be classified into three categories according to the possible factors that a translator can be conscious of in the communicative situation: (1) audience-conscious shifts, (2) style-conscious shifts, and (3) message-conscious shifts. Both speeches offer a positive evaluation of IBBY for its work in connecting children with books; however, each speech has a different focus. While the 1998 speech describes the significance of childhood reading, the 2002 speech congratulates IBBY on its 50th anniversary. The analysis suggests that the translation shifts altered the two speeches to emphasize their individual focus.

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There is a pressing need for trained community interpreters around the world. However, the professionalization of community interpreting presents many challenges. In order to meet these challenges, several standards of practice have been developed by organizations concerned with community interpreting. This study aims to analyze standards of practice of several countries, with the focus on medical interpreting. We reviewed five documents in English and Japanese, all of which included accuracy, confidentiality, and impartiality as key standards. The review describes the degree of maturation of national standards of practice for community interpreters in those countries. We conclude with a suggestion that creating shared standards of practice and relating it to a code of ethics and training could pave the way for further development in the quality of community interpreting, and recognition of community interpreting as a profession.

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In 2009, the new Course of Study for senior high schools was announced by the MEXT for implementation in April 2013. It declares that English classes should be conducted in English by integrating four key linguistic areas. The aim of the present study was to examine how verbal practices based on the Consecutive Interpreting Approach, the basis of which is comprised of shadowing and reproduction, had an effect on L2 written reproduction. The approach was used with 105 students for 14 weeks. Written reproduction activities and their results were then examined. A quantitative analysis revealed that 96 students succeeded in accurately writing out 82.33% of the text consisting of 167 words. Also, the mean value for class satisfaction reached 3.80 out of 4.00. The suggestions made within this study should therefore assist in developing a new instruction method that conforms to the new Course of Study.

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This report describes my observations on the Master of Arts in Japanese Interpreting and Translation (MAJIT) program at the University of Queensland in Australia from the viewpoint of a student, as well as someone who has worked as an interpreter/translator and taught interpreting skills for decades. In this report I will introduce the courses in the MAJIT program and compare them with commercial translation/interpreting (TI) training schools in Japan, which are largely dedicated to training of practical skills. I will then delineate my experiences and observations, and offer some thoughts on the program after finishing the first semester of the two-year program in June 2014. My particular focus is on how courses that do not involve direct training of practical TI skills support overall TI training and how mixing native English and Japanese speakers in class helps the learning process of the students of both languages.

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As various translation technologies are increasingly employed in the translation workflow, especially in the field of technical translation, localisation, and other non-literary translation, it is increasingly important for the practitioners, educators, and researchers of translation to know how to properly evaluate the effectiveness of such technologies in order to use them wisely. This paper reports on an experimental workshop that introduced the basic concepts of the evaluation of translation technologies to a group of translation students and educators who had had limited exposure to such technologies. The workshop was held online, connecting three universities in Japan, USA, and Taiwan. In this paper, we will outline the background􀀃, the method, and the execution of the workshop as well as presenting a brief explanation of the evaluation methods introduced in the workshop, and finally we will discuss the benefit and the future potential of similar types of workshops.

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