Abstract
Abstract The repertoire of linguistic expressions that index sociopragmatic meanings differs considerably from language to language. This difference becomes particularly noticeable when one language is translated into another. As an example, this study examines dialogs in the Japanese translations of two English crime novels to see how the translator deals with normatively gendered morphological forms in Japanese for which no corresponding forms exist in English. The analysis shows that although the same imperative, declarative, and interrogative forms are used for female and male characters in the English originals, in the translations, gendered forms are used not simply based on the gender of the characters but on the interaction of gender with other social variables, in particular class and age. The results and their theoretical implications are discussed, employing the notions of indirect indexing, double-voiced discourse, and cultural filter.
Highlights
In language and gender research, constructivist approaches have been widely adopted since the early 1990s, and it is commonly maintained that a speaker via free accessOkamoto discursively constructs diverse forms of femininity or masculinity as an aspect of their social persona, or identity, by deploying linguistic and paralinguistic resources that index sociopragmatic meanings such as femininity and politeness
This study illustrates the fact that the repertoires of linguistic forms that index sociopragmatic meanings differ widely from language to language
It examined Japanese translations of dialogs in English novels, focusing on the use of gendered sentence-final morphological forms in Japanese that are non-existent in English
Summary
In language and gender research, constructivist approaches have been widely adopted since the early 1990s, and it is commonly maintained that a speaker. (Tutu used omae, a stereotypically masculine second-person pronoun.) As in the earlier examples, such assignments of masculine forms via free access to Tutu and Beaupre seem to indicate the translator’s ideologically-mediated assumption about the language of working-class older women, whose voices are presented as more direct and forceful than the use of –kashira by Ballard in (12). Given these findings, one might wonder if the translator would assign masculine forms to all older female characters or only to working-class women and not to middle-class women. (15) [LS: E p. 353; J vol 2, pp. 232–233: Ballard, fighting with Rob Compton in the car, tells him to get off the car.]
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