Speech without a speaking body: “Japanese women's language” in translation

Abstract

Central to the way in which “women's language” is experienced in the Japanese everyday is a profound cognitive dissonance: The majority of women do not speak “women's language” and, yet, they recognize it as their own language. This article seeks to understand how metalinguistic devices—such as reported speech and quotation—and the intertextuality that they create serve both to produce and at the same time to normalize such dissonance, and thus women's language as language ideology. To make my point, I will focus on reported speech in interlingual translation, and its role in the reproduction of the idea of women's language.