More Japanese than the Japanese: Translations of interviews with foreigners

Abstract

A striking feature in interviews of non-Japanese speakers is that the translations of the interviewees' answers use more gender markers than would currently be heard in the replies of native speakers. Sentence-final particles such as ze and zo (indicating strong assertion, and used by men), and wa and yo (indicating mild assertion and establishing an emotional connection, and used by women) are employed much more often, almost to the point of exaggeration. This paper will explore the reasons why, and the extent to which, gender in the Japanese language is magnified in the interpreted utterances of those who don't speak the language.

Keywords:

• Japanese language
• gender
• sports

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Triangle Center for Japanese Studies Library Grant for Japan Studies visitors. I would like to express my gratitude to Professor Hiroko Yabe, Mark A. Katz, Daisuke Itō, Oscar Moreno, Kristina Troost, Luo Zhou, and Clarence McCoy for their assistance throughout the researching and writing of this paper, and to the two anonymous referees who have provided me with much constructive advice on its topic. One of the latter scholars, whom I know only as ‘Referee 1’, reviewed the manuscript with particular care, catching errors which I should have caught myself; I hope that what I have produced meets his or her expectations and that it will make a contribution, however small it may be, to his or her own research on translation. Finally, I wish to thank the individuals at the Japan Broadcast Corporation (NHK) who assisted me in locating an important article published in their journal (although some of them may not be pleased with my final conclusion).

Biographical notes

Yuki Takatori is an associate professor of Japanese and the advisor for Asian Studies at Georgia State University in Atlanta, Georgia. She has been conducting research on translation, phonology and writing systems. She received her Ph. D from Yale University.

Notes

1. The difference between the desu after an adjective and the desu after a noun is that the addition of the latter only serves to make the predicate into a long form; being a stylistic marker, it has no lexical meaning. On the other hand, the former is a copula, meaning ‘it is’ or ‘it will be’ (Bloch, 1946, pp. 108–109; Jorden, 1987, p. 40 and p. 51).

2. Japanese is a ‘pro-drop’ language, in which pronouns are omitted whenever their referents can be inferred.

3. For the transliteration of Japanese words and sentences, I have used the Kunrei system, which was adopted in 1989 by the International Organization of Standardization in ISO 3602: Documentation – Romanization of Japanese.

4. Following each of these back translations in parenthesis are my loose back translations of the subtitles displayed with the extended predicate and particles, conveying the conspicuously different flavour and spirit imparted by their addition.

5. Retrieved from http://dictionary.goo.ne.jp/celeb/

6. Although the data collected in this manner may have limited the scope of my analysis, it is significant that the tendency discovered in it is corroborated by the more data-driven studies cited in this paper.

7. Here, unlike examples in (1) and (2), there are no back translations illustrating the different flavour produced by the addition of the extended predicate or sentence-final particles.

8. Miyamoto Musashi was a 16th century Japanese swordsman.

9. Retrieved from from http://www.bunka.go.jp/kokugo_nihongo/yoronchousa/h22/pdf/h22_chosa_kekka.pdf http://www.bunka.go.jp/kokugo_nihongo/yoronchousa/h12/kekka.html.