In the early Showa-era, the Japanese publishing market experienced what was then referred to as the ‘yen-pon boom.’ ‘Yen-pon (literally, one-yen book)’ means a series of selected literary works sold at a price of one yen apiece. The price was reasonable so that general readers could readily afford to read canonical works. This new type of publication exerted great influence upon literary circles. This paper will analyse, by examining ‘paratext’ such as statements on translation and on foreign literature in leaflets supplemented to each volume of yen-pons, what policy and norms of translation the publishers formulated in the yen-pon. It will also illustrate that publishers gained more control over the act of translation, aiming at widening the literary market for ordinary readers and at the same time enlightening the readers by means of source-oriented approach toward translation that academics adopted to their research.

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Female speech in Japanese translation is overly feminised compared to real Japanese women’s discourse (esp. See Furukawa 2013a). As such, it appears that women’s language is not a ‘real’ language variety used by Japanese women but, rather, a type of knowledge that Japanese women are assumed to possess. That is, the over-feminising convention maintains and reinforces gender ideology and the subordinate position of women in Japanese society, and makes women invisible and unheard in Japanese translation. Thus, this paper investigates how the idea of feminism can be incorporated in Japanese translation, and what the meaning of feminist translation is in the Japanese context by exploring Feminism and western feminist translation.

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Localization includes translation of digital content such as software, video games, or websites. In addition to being the language spoken in the United States, which is an important sales market, English often serves as a pivot language in localization. In other words, the ability to translate into English is indispensable for many localizers. In this paper, we study English used in software user interfaces (UIs) with the register analysis method so that results can be utilized in translator education to improve the target text generation competence. The results show that, compared with other registers, UI English frequently uses modals (can), 2nd person pronouns, and demonstrative determiners (this). It also contains more imperatives, more sentence fragments, and placeholders that appear only in software. These linguistic characteristics come from the situational characteristics such as shared contexts between a user and software.

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This paper investigates scientific translation carried out by Fukuzawa Yukichi in his translated treatise Kinmo Kyuri Zukai. We focus on specific items in the volume to analyze his translation with a viewpoint of “cultural transposition.” According to the text analysis comparing TT with ST, we have found that Fukuzawa’s translation was carried out mainly by communicative translation by the definition of Haywood et al. (2009). On the one hand, there are more domesticating translation as cultural transplantation about the description of daily tools and part of places. On the other, his translation partially retains foreigness on the measurement equipment, personal names and part of other places by cultural borrowing. Scientific terms describing scientific principles and phenomena are translated in four different ways including deletion. Although some shifts are found by Fukuzawa’s translation, the basic scientific principles and scientific laws in the ST are retained in the TT.

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Since the launch of the University of Warwick project on “Translation in Global News” in the mid-2000s, the unique position translation has in the practice of journalism—which is now commonly referred to as news translation—has been attracting increased attention in the field of Translation Studies. A number of case studies have been carried out worldwide over the past decade, but few attempts have been made to establish a theoretical framework that can be used to analyze the decision-making process behind the predominant strategies used in news translation, such as omission. This article discusses the possible application of Anthony Pym’s concept of “risk management” for this analysis. It aims to illustrate how the distinctive settings in which news translations are performed—strictly time-bound and highly pressured both politically and socially—calls for a new analytical approach, which this non-conventional concept in Translation Studies may be able to provide.

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There exist gaps between evaluative meaning in the source text and that in the target text, even in scientific translation. These gaps result from three types of evaluative shifts: addition (from non-evaluative to evaluative), omission (from evaluative to non-evaluative), and adjustment (from evaluative to evaluative). This paper aims to find out what kind of evaluative expression tends to be involved in which type of evaluative shift. The data include 42 English articles in two scientific magazines and their Japanese and Chinese translation. Evaluative shifts seem random translational phenomena because they depend on the translator’s personal preference. Our results show that there are some tendencies in evaluative shifts in Japanese and Chinese translations. These tendencies may be explained by linguistic, social and translational factors.

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This paper aims to critically review translation strategy theories that have been proposed abroad, and reconsider the significance and location of this concept in translation studies. Based on the fundamental nature as a well-planned action for achieving an aim or skillful planning, translation strategies are categorized into three research stances (descriptive, committed, pedagogical/evaluative) and two levels (macro/global, micro/local), and by being compared with the term translation norm, they are distinguished from translation shifts. Furthermore, they are minutely analyzed more as being cognitive, procedural and conscious conversion process than being results of textual and static product analysis. And suggestions are made toward bridging translation theories and practices as several practical translation strategies are proposed for translation working process.

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