Translating Japanese Wordplay into English and Filipino A Linguistic Analysis of Joke Translation in Spy x Family Subtitles

Abstract

Japanese animated shows called “anime” have seen increased popularity among Philippine audiences in the 2000s and beyond partly because of television broadcasts and online streaming platforms, but one possible hindrance to the understanding of the media is the language gap, since Japanese and the Philippine national lingua franca Filipino, along with the international lingua franca English, are unrelated languages. To bridge this gap, a number of channels and sites provide translations of the shows into th e languages spoken by Filipinos, and one of the forms that they take are subtitles: texts in the target language placed near the bottom of the screen, providing viewers with line-by-line translations of the dialogue. Through the analysis of three examples of Japanese linguistic humor and their corresponding translations into Filipino and English, this paper aimed to understand strategies translators use in presenting wordplay to unrelated languages. Results reveal that a word – by-word translation is not always followed, and translators put the target languages’ culture, structure, lexicon and patterns into consideration. Examples include the use of the figurative-literal dichotomy of the meanings of words in both Filipino and English when the original Japa nese material utilizes the exactly similar pronunciation between two words with entirely different meanings. Keywords : sociolinguistics, multilingualism, globalization, translation