scholarly journals A Study on the Chinese-Japanese Translation of Tourism Public Signs From the Perspective of Functional Translation Theory

Author(s):  
Weiwei Geng
2002 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-126 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Gile

Summary Japanese publications on translation are markedly more numerous than Western publications. They are aimed at the general public rather than at professionals or academics, and few are truly scientific or academic. They deal with the Japanese context, with hardly any reference to foreign publications, authors, ideas or translation activities. They are also short-lived and disappear from bookstores and publishers' stocks within a few years. Theoretical translation texts are "philosophical" rather than scientific. Didactic texts are often aimed at language learners rather than at would-be translators. Linguistic translation texts are more interesting for the insight they give into the Japanese language and its use than for their contribution to translation theory. Texts that criticize published translations are numerous and very popular, something which is rather unique in the world. Many translation books are highly personal and contain numerous anecdotes from their authors' lives. Interpretation books are interesting, as they are more pragmatic than Western texts on the same subject, and address questions that Western publications seldom or never refer to. Machine translation articles are becoming increasingly popular. They tend to be confined to superficial explanations of the operation of systems and to descriptions of commercial products. Truly scientific papers on MT also exist, but their circulation is limited to academic and technical circles. There are a few periodicals dealing with translation. Most of the articles they carry are written by the same authors and have the same characteristics as the texts described above. On the whole, they are more interesting than translation books, as they are shorter and therefore denser. Articles on translation can also be found in countless books and periodicals on the Japanese language, on linguistics, sociology, public speaking, etc., as well as in weekly and monthly magazines and in other publications. This paper is followed by a list of Japanese texts on translation and by a list of Western language texts on translation of Japanese or on subjects relevant to the understanding of Japanese translation problems.


Author(s):  
Hiroko Sano

This chapter examines translation theory and practice in the context of the specific linguistic and cultural challenges that arise when translating Milton’s poetry into accessible Japanese. Milton has been known in Japan as being as important as Shakespeare, but his works have a limited readership while Shakespeare has had a strong presence. Elements that account for Milton’s reception are Milton scholarship in Japan, characteristics of the Japanese language, the archaic sound of Milton’s grand English style especially given Japanese translational choices, and a Christianity articulated too immediately and profoundly for a culture in which Christian training and history are almost absent. This chapter then provides a personal account and the theoretical underpinnings of Sano’s recent Japanese translation of Samson Agonistes and her participation in a well-received production in 2012 of poet Takahashi’s adaptation of Milton’s tragedy in the Noh style.


Fachsprache ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 40 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 63-78
Author(s):  
Margarete Flöter-Durr ◽  
Thierry Grass

Despite the work of Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson (1989), the concept of relevance has not enjoyed the popularity it deserved among translators as it appears to be more productive in information science and sociology than in translation studies. The theory of relevance provides underpinnings of a unified account of translation proposed by Ernst-August Gutt. However, if the concept of relevance should take into account all parameters of legal translation, the approach should be pragmatic and not cognitive: The aim of a relevant translation is to produce a legal text in the target language which appears relevant to the lawyer in the target legal system, namely a text that can be used in the same way as the original source text. The legal translator works as a facilitator from one legal system into another and relevance is the core of this pragmatic approach which requires translation techniques like adaptation rather than through-translation or calque (in the terminology of Delisle/Lee-Jahnk/Cormier 1999). This contribution tries to show that relevance theory, which was developed in the field of sociology by Alfred Schütz, could also be applied to translation theory with the aim of producing a correct translation in a concrete situation. Some examples extracted from one year of the practice of an expert law translator (German-French) at the Court of Appeal in the Alsace region illustrate our claim and underpin an approach of legal translation and its heuristics that is both pragmatic and reflexive.


Semiotica ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Guangxu Zhao

Abstract For some Western translators before the twentieth century, domestication was their strategy to translate the classical Chinese poetry into English. But the consequence of this strategy was the sacrifice of the ideogrammic nature of these poems. The translators in the twentieth century, especially the Imagist poets and translators in the 1930s, overcame the problems of their predecessors and their translation theory and practice was close to that of the contemporary semiotic translators. But both Imagist translators and contemporary semiotic translators have the problem of indifference to the feeling of the original in their translations. For the problem of translating the classical Chinese poetry by the Westerners before the twentieth century and the Imagist poets and translators of the twentieth century, see Zhao and Flotow 2018. This paper attempts to set up an aesthetic-semiotic approach to the translation of the iconicity of classical Chinese poetry on the basis of the examination of both Eastern and Western translation studies.


2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 393-420
Author(s):  
Gabriele Klein

Abstract: This text aims to analyze the process of passing on choreographies, as exemplified in the work of the Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch. It presents this process as a praxis of translation. The paper discusses the limitations and possibilities of translating choreography, as well as the specific potential inherent and visible in practices of translating choreographies by Pina Bausch. From a philosophical and sociological perspective of translation theory and based on a methodology of the ‘praxeological production analysis’ (Klein, 2014a; 2015a), I’m using data gathered during rehearsals and two years of interviews with dancers and collaborators of the Tanztheater Wuppertal Pina Bausch. The text will demonstrate that the translation of choreographies is characterized by a paradox between identity and difference.


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