Constructing the image of Japan as a tourist destination: translation procedures for culture-specific items

ABSTRACT

This study investigates translation procedures employed for culture-specific items (CSIs) in Japanese tourism texts. Quantitative corpus-based methods were used to examine a unidirectional parallel corpus of texts gathered from websites promoting tourism to regional destinations. The aim of the analysis was to determine whether, and if so how, translation procedures for CSIs are conditioned by CSI category, and the impact exerted at the macro level on the image of Japan as a tourist destination. The analysis reveals that CSI category is a conditioning factor modulating the choice of translation procedure. Drawing on Lawrence Venuti’s conceptual framework of domestication and foreignisation, the findings suggest a predominant tendency towards domestication in the translation of CSIs in Japanese tourism literature, airbrushing the strangeness of the source text. A key contribution is the incorporation of quantitative methods to analyse the translation of CSIs in tourism texts, notably in culturally remote source and target language communities.

KEYWORDS:

• Tourism
• translation procedures
• culture-specific items
• Japan

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Dr Haidee Kotze for her advice and feedback on an earlier draft of this article. I am also grateful to the two anonymous reviewers for their critical and perceptive comments, which have greatly improved this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Note on contributor

Angela Turzynski-Azimi is a PhD candidate in the Department of Linguistics at Macquarie University and a tutor and practitioner in Japanese to English translation. Her current research interests focus on descriptive corpus-based translation studies in the area of journalistic discourse.

Notes

1 The 2020 Tokyo Olympic and Paralympic Games have now been postponed to 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

2 Data source URLs: http://deepnorthjapan.org/; http://www.morioka-hachimantai.jp/; http://www.morioka-hachimantai.jp/eng/index.html; http://www.city.semboku.akita.jp/index.php; http://www.city.semboku.akita.jp/en/; https://www.city.yamatokoriyama.nara.jp/; https://www.city.yamatokoriyama.nara.jp/overseas/english/; https://www.abakanko.jp/; https://www.abakanko.jp/en/; https://hokkaido-labo.com/; https://hokkaido-labo.com/en/.

3 Each text in the corpus is accompanied by visual content. While I acknowledge the multisemiotic nature of the corpus, the interplay between word and image was beyond the constraints of this study.

4 The researcher’s British/Australian background served as the ‘touchstone’ (Nord, 2014, p. 34) for determining CSIs.

5 The CSI なまはげ namahage ‘fearsome demons’ is concentrated in a single text so was excluded from the sample.

6 Japanese words here and elsewhere in the article are represented in Japanese characters, followed by a transliteration in italics rendered using the modified Hepburn system and an English gloss.

Additional information

Funding

The research on which this article is based was supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program (RTP) Scholarship.