When translating for broadcast news in Japanese television stations, the producers of news programs decide on which style of translation is appropriate for the material to be broadcast. In breaking news and in live events, simultaneous interpreting is often used, but in most other cases, subtitles provide the dominant alternative. This article first explores the transition process from simultaneous interpreting to subtitling in the broadcast news of scientific events followed by the analyses of the subtitling process within the Japanese broadcast media from the perspective of the news production side.

View full abstract

As Calzada Pérez (2005) says, "cross-cultural communication cannot be understood without taking into account phenomena such as multi-modality and...images need translating as much as words". The present paper focuses on multi-modality and illustrates the interaction between images and words in translation. The following is a proposed framework for a model of a three-step analysis of the interaction between images and words in translation. The first step is the analysis of "inter-image translation", i.e. to check whether images of a source text are modified or not. The second step is the analysis of "intermodal translation" which describes whether nonverbal information is verbalized and vice versa; the third step examines whether functions of images are changed or not. By using this framework concrete examples of three Japanese picture books are compared with English and German versions, to find out how the functions of the same images can be changed by intermodal explicitation.

View full abstract

Samuel Robbins Brown’s Chifu Shinsho 致富新書 was published in Hong Kong in 1847 and reprinted in Japan in 1871. In 1875, Chifu Shinsho 致富新書 was translated into Japanese as Chifu Shinron Yakkai 致富新論訳解 by Yu Nakajima and Itsuzou Sanui. This paper first describes the background of translation of Chifu Shinsho and establishes the English original. Then the paper explains the annotated version of Chifu Shinsho and the process and features of Chifu Shinron Yakkai, a Japanese translation of Chifu Shinron.

View full abstract

Reginald Horace Blyth’s Haiku, published in four volumes from 1949 to 1952, were anthologies of Japanese haiku. His books attracted the attention of many writers, most notably the Beat school poets such as Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and Jack Kerouac mainly because of his assumption that the haiku was the poetic expression of Zen. The purpose of this paper is to examine how R. H. Blyth’s translation of haiku was affected by his perception of haiku. First, it provides an overview of translations of haiku before Blyth in order to clarify characteristics of his translation. Next, it discusses his perception of haiku and features of his haiku translation. It concludes that Blyth’s perception of haiku affected various aspects of his translation.

View full abstract

Instructors of English-to-Japanese translation know from their experience that translations by students, particularly those at the entry to intermediate levels, contain far more ko-type demonstratives (roughly equivalent to “this”) and so-type demonstratives (roughly “the” “that” or “it”) than is typical for comparable texts written originally in Japanese. The unusually high occurrence of those demonstratives can be explained in large part by the students’ unnecessary or inappropriate use of them as translations of, among other elements, English cohesive devices that Halliday & Hasan (1976) categorized as reference items. Redundancy cannot explain all of the increased use of ko and so demonstratives, however, since professional translators also tend to produce texts marked by their heavy use. This paper attempts to determine where such extra ko and so arise from.

View full abstract

The main purpose of this paper is to report on a translation workshop on film subtitling. The workshop held by the author was targeted for beginners to acquire not only translation skills but also to experience the technical processes using a subtitle editing tool, Subtitle Workshop. The paper discusses the problems that the beginners encountered during the technical processes and the common mistakes often seen in their translation processes. Hence, the paper describes the crucial points when teaching subtitle translation to beginners.

View full abstract