Translation and celebrity: The translation strategies of Haruki Murakami and their implications for the visibility paradigm

Abstract

Questions of visibility are of keen interest to translators and students of translation alike. The tendency in many contemporary contexts for translators' roles and efforts to be overshadowed by source authors' are what gave rise to Venuti's hugely famous and popular notion of foreignization, describing a strategy for translators to highlight their own presence through their work. However, even within contemporary cultures, this same tendency to overlook translators is not universal. Japan boasts a number of what might be called “celebrity translators”, who command a substantial presence, and have a palpable effect over a range of the country's text production trends and norms. This article examines the work of Haruki Murakami, who could be called the quintessential celebrity translator. It argues that Murakami's highly idiosyncratic style has come about as a result of his high degree of visibility, rather than the obverse, as the foreignization paradigm would suggest.

Keywords:

• Haruki Murakami
• celebrity translators
• visibility
• foreignization
• Japanese
• fame

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Dr Nana Sato-Rossberg, for her kind advice, guidance, and expert opinion on all things related to Japanese translation studies. We would also like to thank the members of the Japanese Studies Writing Workshop at the Sainsbury Institute for the Study of Japanese Arts and Cultures for reading and commenting on the early manuscript.

Biographical notes

James Hadley is a visiting scholar in translation studies at the School of Foreign Studies, Nanjing Agricultural University, China, where he researches and teaches translation theory with a focus on East Asian contexts.

Motoko Akashi is undertaking her doctoral research at the School of Politics, Philosophy, Language and Communication Studies at the University of East Anglia. Her research is funded by a Sasakawa scholarship, and centres on the notion of celebrity translators as it impacts on the paradigm of translator visibility. She has worked for several years as a freelance translator.

Notes

1. Excepting Murakami, whose name is conventionally rendered surname last in English texts, Japanese names in the article have been rendered surname first in accordance with Japanese custom.

2. The ‘traditional visibility paradigm’ mentioned here refers to a common extrapolation of Venuti's findings beyond the British and North American contexts on which he bases his argument. While it is clear that Venuti does not declare his conceptualization to be universally applicable, it has, nevertheless, unquestionably had a significant influence over thinking on translator visibility in general. Thus, this article does not refer to Venuti's conceptualization in order to challenge it per se, but in order to contrast the relatively under-researched context of Japanese translation with the ‘Anglo-American’ contexts described by Venuti, arguably the most broadly understood contexts in current translation literature.

3. All translations and back-translations in this article have been produced by the authors unless otherwise referenced.

4. For a more detailed exploration and definition of Murakami's translating and writing styles than can be included here, see Rubin (2002).