A huge number of English literary works have been translated by many Japanese scholars of English Literary Studies. By producing and criticising translations as well as by conducting research into English literature, these academics have constructed norms governing these translations. In the early Showa era, while the dominant norm consisted of the pursuit of fidelity to the original, the artistic and creative aspects of translation gradually became emphasised in discussions of translation. In this paper I examine the ‘negotiation’ of norms for translating English literature embodied in translation criticism by English literary scholars in the early Showa era. I will also explore how English Literary Studies and a socio-cultural situation exerted an influence on the negotiation of the translation norms.

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[in Japanese]

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Translated movie subtitles rapidly flash across the screen, keeping pace with actors’ lines. They need to be concise while retaining their original meaning. To meet this need, some linguistic devices are employed during the translations, one of which is the change in the degree of specificity of expressions in the original lines and the translated subtitles. This paper explores 1) whether the original meaning is retained when the degree of specificity increases or decreases in the subtitles; 2) the role the change in the degree of specificity plays in the understanding of viewers; and 3) what kind of original expressions are likely to be candidates for the change in the degree of specificity. We argue that both increasing and decreasing the degree of specificity serve to reduce the processing cost of the viewers while retaining “dynamic equivalence” as defined by Nida (1964) between the original lines and the subtitles.

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In order to consider ways to make correspondences between Source Texts (ST) and Target Texts (TT), this paper explores two different translations of the Bible into German. One of them is Martin Luther's work (the Old and New Testaments) published in the early 16th century, and the other is by Franz Rosenzweig and Martin Buber (the Old Testament or the Hebrew Bible) translated around the mid 20th century. Correspondences could be understood differently by each translator as the translators this paper focuses on found different correspondences to be respected. Among the three translators, Rosenzweig's philosophical thought on translation is discussed. A famous translation theory by Friedrich Schleiermacher is introduced, and according to his theory different ways by which the two translations produced are analyzed. Through the discussion of this paper, some of the meanings of correspondences will be explained.

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This paper attempts to provide a theoretical foundation for some of the translation strategies to be taken when translating head-initial language (English) into head-final language (Japanese), focusing on the cognitive experience of readers of translation. After critically reviewing relevant studies in translation studies, linguistics, psycholinguistics, and cognitive psychology in terms of the role of storage component of working memory in sentence comprehension, the paper highlights the ‘compensatory strategies’ for sentence comprehension (Ueno and Polinsky 2005). Drawing on the ‘compensatory strategies’, the author suggests that when translating into Japanese, translators should try to reduce the number of arguments preceding the grammatical head so that readers of translation can be spared of cognitive overload of holding too many arguments in their working memory.

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Focusing on Gideon Toury’s ‘translational norms’, this article reconsiders in-depth meanings of the term ‘norms’ and explores possibilities to develop methodological approaches for relating the ‘norms’ to Bourdieusian concepts of field and habitus. Also, its application to localization is taken into consideration as a part of case study for my future research project. According to Toury (1995), translation is a norm-governed activity; however, the term ‘norms’ are understood differently among researchers and practitioners. Practitioners treat norms in a prescriptive sense telling them what the translation should be, whereas researchers from descriptive and pure translation studies regard them as descriptive statements stating what the translation is. The difference is captured in terms of a descriptive aspect in this paper. In turn, the descriptive ‘norms’ are compared with Bourdieusian model of habitus as well as field; specifically, the two methods to study norms, ‘textual’ and ‘extratextual’, suggested by Toury, are reduced into ‘habitus’ and ‘field’, respectively. In the last part of the paper, the application of this method to a case study, translation practice in localization fields, are touched on, with raising further research questions that need to be addressed.

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It has been pointed out that current professional education in various domains at the tertiary level tends to be incapable of providing professional trainings in which their teaching/ learning contents do not meet requirements set by professional communities. This concern appears to be consistent with translator education due to its ongoing dominant use of ‘transmissionist’ approach (Kiraly, 2000). Discussion presented in this paper is based on the partial findings of the ongoing PhD research project. The research project as a whole makes an attempt to introduce a new pedagogical approach based on the concepts of expertise and problem-solving, and their application to translator education. To enable this approach to be realised in translator education, identifying translation challenges with which a translator is likely to face and discrepancies of such challenges between novice and expert translators are very necessary. In this paper, the focus of discussion is placed primarily on the exploration of ‘authentic’ translator challenges and the investigation of discrepancies in terms of the challenges between novice and expert translators.

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