Past IJET - IJET-24 in Hawaii
Sessions
Pains of Translating the Man’yōshū and other Premodern Japanese Texts
This presentation addresses several issues pertinent to the translation of premodern Japanese texts into English: (1) problems of translating one culture into another culture, e.g. how does one translate a Buddhist term 三世 into English? (2) diachronically false friends, like Modern Japanese kanashii ‘to be sad’ vs. Old Japanese ‘to be dear’, (3) discrepancies between Old Japanese and even Classical Japanese grammar, not to mention Modern Japanese, (4) accommodating dialect differences between Western Old Japanese of Kinki area and Eastern Old Japanese of Southern Chūbu and Kantō areas, (5) dealing with loanwords from foreign languages such as Korean and Ainu.
