Abstract
In Japanese literature, both original and translated, a virtual language that is not used by actual Japanese-speaking people has been used since the late nineteenth century. The language is named “yakuwarigo [role language]” because it can be employed in different ways to create different images of the speaker. During the period, the feminine ideal was related to women’s language, which is a type of yakuwarigo, and girls were instructed about how women should behave and speak. The function of yakuwarigo has been strengthened and repeatedly imparted to children, and consequently it has helped to instil women’s language in readers’ minds, and arguably reinforced the subordinate role of women in Japanese society. Therefore, this paper first investigates the history of yakuwarigo since the nineteenth century, and then explores the link between yakuwarigo and ideology by analysing the three Japanese translations of one of the most influential examples of children’s literature in Japan, Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, from polysystem and feminist perspectives.
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Notes
This story is from A sportsman’s sketches, and the translation was revised in 1896.
Subjects are often omitted in sentences in Japanese.
The survey was conducted on 13,704 students and pupils, and 10,930 responded. The breakdown is as follows: 7,598 elementary school students, 2,924 junior high school students, 314 high school students and 85 others. The classification of gender is: males 5,787 (52.9 %); females 5,107 (46.7 %); 36 did not respond (0.3 %).
Regarding the sex of the three translators, they are all female. My previous analysis indicates that male translators are more prone to use feminine language than female translators in the speech of characters (Furukawa forthcoming).
The term ‘culture’ is used in a broad sense here. Culture is defined as ‘ideas, knowledge (correct, wrong, or unverifiable belief) and recipes for doing things’ (Hall and Neitz 1993: 4, italics in original). Culture is the way of a people’s life—their thought and behaviour—which is influenced by the political, economic and social circumstances (Hatch 1985: 178). Although any group in a society can have its own culture within the realm from this definition, in this paper I mean by ‘culture’ the whole of Japanese culture.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported by a Grant-in-Aid for Young Scientists (B) from the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (Research Project No. 25760015).
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Furukawa, H. Intracultural translation into an ideological language: the case of the Japanese translations of Anne of Green Gables . Neohelicon 42, 297–312 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-015-0299-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-015-0299-4