The contrastive analysis of multiple translations: Sukiyaki song from Japanese to English

Abstract

This research developed out of a translation analysis course, which the author has been teaching for the last two years for 300 level students. The course is intended to serve an academic purpose (not for training professional translators) and aims to enable students to conduct translation analyses and evaluations of other people’s practices. This paper will present a model of contrastive translation analyses based on linguistic semantics using two case studies: one is a translation from Japanese to English analysing a song called ‘Sukiyaki’, which is one of the most famous Japanese popular songs in the last century. Many translations in English can be found on the web. Students in the course have to do the translation practice from Japanese to English and then compare their own rendition with Yoko Ono’s translation in the final examination of the course. Using these two examples of translation analyses, this paper will discuss student’s learnability of linguistic techniques by means of comparing more than one translations from three directions: (i) how two completely different languages such as Japanese and English can reach a certain point of conceptual and cultural equivalence in translations, (ii) how to describe what is lost and retained from a source text, and (iii) what aspects can inform which translation is better than others in one language. This presentation hopes to contribute toward the process of creating a better standardization for translation analyses, because translation studies have a long history but have been overlooked in academic fields.