Japanese Script Research Articles

Can faithfulness to the original text betray the target public? The adaptations of Mononokehime (Princess Mononoke) in Italy

Abstract Over the past few years audio-visual translation in ‘dubbing countries’ has been experiencing a significant shift from the traditional domesticating approach to a foreignizing approach that focuses more on faithfulness towards the source text rather than to the target readership. The Italian rendition of anime is a case in point: while appreciated by an increasing number of viewers, both serial and stand-alone anime, have either suffered a limited distribution or a highly homogenizing adaptation, in many cases through the employment of English as vehicular language. The first Italian dubbed version of the popular Studio Ghibli masterpiece Mononokehime (Princess Mononoke) (Miyazaki, 1996) is a clear example of the latter. The version distributed by Buena Vista International in 2000 as Princess Mononoke was adapted from the North American version, which included radical modifications aimed at providing a context with which the spectators would be more familiar. A second version, distributed by Lucky Red in 2014 under the title Principessa Mononoke, was re-adapted from the original Japanese script in order to improve fidelity to the original and was re-dubbed with a new voice cast. However, numerous viewers have criticized the unintelligibility of most of the dialogue. This article analyses the differences between the two versions and investigates whether the visibility of the translator can be seen as an obstacle for the understanding and enjoyment of films for the target viewership.

Scripted voices: script’s role in creating Japanese manga dialogue

ABSTRACTThe construction of dialogue in comics often involves both visual and graphic considerations, with changes to the shape, size, font, colour, and even orientation of text and speech bubbles used to establish characters’ identities and voices in the medium. However, while many styles of graphic manipulation in comic dialogue have been discussed and researched to date, the variant use of script has seen little attention. In this study, I examine if and how locally variant uses of the Japanese hiragana, katakana and kanji scripts are used to index information about speakers and speech acts in three series of Japanese manga (comics). The findings show that marked selections of each script are used to index specific effects and social voices, with the interplay between script choice and the surrounding visuals often working together to establish information in the analysed texts.

In Memoriam

The Italian/Australian Mongolist and Sinologist Igor de Rachewiltz descended from a Lombardic noble family. His fascination with the Japanese script started when he was a little boy, and consequently he studied East Asian languages and culture. Among his teachers were Pasquale M. d’Elia and Giovanni Vacca in Rome. Enticed by the Mongolian script the student decided to focus on Mongol history and culture. He received a Ph.D. grant from the Australian National University and took his Ph.D. there with an intensive study on Yelü Chucai, the eminent statesman of the Mongol period of China. He made Canberra his home for his entire life and published a series of important works, such as a whole set of volumes of biographical materials for the Yuan dynasty and a careful, fully annotated three volume translation of the principal source of early Mongol history, the Secret History of the Mongols. Shortly before his passing he had the full translation (though without most of the copious notes and references) published in an open access version on the Internet. Among his last works were an Introduction to Altaic Philology (with V. Rybatzki) and an English translation of the Geser epic (not yet published). He was a splendid scholar and it is to be regretted that he was not able to establish a “school” to carry on his scholarly tradition in Australia.

Urdu ligature recognition using multi-level agglomerative hierarchical clustering

Optical character recognition (OCR) system holds great significance in human-machine interaction. OCR has been the subject of intensive research especially for Latin, Chinese and Japanese script. Comparatively, little work has been done for Urdu OCR, due to the complexities and segmentation errors associated with its cursive script. This paper proposes an Urdu OCR system which aims at ligature-level recognition of Urdu text. This ligature based recognition approach overcomes the character-levelsegmentation problems associated with cursive scripts. A newly developed OCR algorithm is introduced that uses a semi-supervised multi-level clustering for categorization of the ligatures. Classification is performed using four machine learning techniques i.e. decision trees, linear discriminant analysis, naive Bayes and k-nearest neighbor (K-NN). The system was implemented and the results show 62, 61, 73 and 90% accuracy for decision tree, linear discriminant analysis, naive Bayes and K-NN respectively.

Pseudoneglect in sentence bisection: a comparison between Italian and Chinese

ABSTRACTBoth reading habits and cerebral asymmetries may play a role on bisection bias. There has been shown to be more recruitment of the right hemisphere in reading Chinese, compared to Japanese or alphabetic scripts. One therefore would expect that for sentence bisection in Chinese compared to Italian, a stronger allocation of attention to the left, mediated by the right hemisphere, would yield larger leftward bisection errors. In this study, native Chinese and Italian speakers bisected Chinese and Italian sentences, respectively, which varied in linguistic domain (syntactic or semantic coherence, definiteness and heaviness) and in the position of the linguistic manipulation (left, right and absent). The sentences were bisected more leftwards for Chinese than for Italian. Bisection deviations were further modulated by the position of the linguistic manipulation, though only for Chinese. We concluded that visuo-perceptual, linguistic and attentional factors influence sentence bisection, in a different way in Italian and Chinese.

An orthographic bridge between Japanese and Afrikaans - the choice of a roman transliteration system

By die saamstel van vertalende woordeboeke tussen tale wat tipologies (en genealogies) verwant is, het die leksikograaf reeds te doen met 'n meerdoelige gebruiksinstrument wat, benewens semantiese ekwivalensie en 'n verskeidenheid ander linguistiese faktore, die pragmatiese behoeftes van die waarskynlike gebruikers in ag moet neem. In die geval van twee tale wat verskillende ortografieë gebruik, word daar 'n verdere dimensie toegevoeg, deurdat toegang tot die klanke en betekenisse van die vertaalekwivalent afgeskerm word deur n sisteem van simbole wat eers baasgeraak moet word. Om die "vreemde" taal meer toeganklik te maak, word 'n sisteem van transliterasie van die teikentaal in die ortografie van die bekende taal dan gebruik, sodat die noodsaaklikheid om die inheemse ortografie te bemeester, voorlopig uitgestel word. In hierdie artikel word die benutting van die romeinse ortografie in 'n Afrikaans-Japannese woordeboek onder die loep geneem, waardeur ook pragmatiese en linguistiese aspekte 'n rol speel. As agtergrond word 'n kort oorsig gegee van die inheemse skryfwyses van Japannees, te wete kanji,1 hiragana en katakana, asook die historiese aanloop tot die ontwikkeling van 'n romeinse transliterasiestelsel (roomaji), waarvan daar verskillende variante bestaan. Die Hepburn-sisteem, een van die roomaji-variante, is afgestem op, en word verkies deur, buitelandse leerders van Japannees, deurdat dit spesifiek leiding gee op die vlak van die uitspraak. Maar ook die Hepburn-sisteem word aangepas by die behoeftes van verskillende gebruikersgroepe, ten einde die interpretasie van die teks fonologies en grammatikaal vir die leser te vergemaklik. Op grond van tipologiese, grammatikale, en veral fonologiese verskille tussen Japannees en Afrikaans is daar sekere keuses gemaak ten opsigte van spelling (veral by lang vokale) en skryfwyse (bv. die gebruik van koppeltekens), wat deur 'n aantal gebruiksvoorbeelde gemotiveer word. Wat die prosodiese verskille betref, het die keuse, op grond van leesbaarheidsoorwegings, geval op die gebruik van klankgrepe van uitspraak deur 'n moedertaalspreker wat by wyse van 'n hiperskakel vir elke woord wat deur n lemma voorgestel word, gehoor kan word.

Orthography, Foreigners, and Fluency: Indexicality and Script Selection in Japanese Manga

Although writing conventions in Japanese influence the choice of script on most occasions, non-standard selections of orthography have been noted throughout the history of the written language. Despite this, empirical study has only provided perfunctory explanations of this phenomenon. What little inquiry exists often ignores context, and has focused almost entirely on the use of katakana. This study attempts to fix some of these issues and further the understanding of this feature of written Japanese, contextually examining and comparing variation between all the Japanese scripts. Data is taken from the speech of non-native Japanese speakers across four manga series, with the study employing the theory of indexicality to explain how an author’s non-standard selection of orthography plays a part in transmitting information to a reader.

Editorial: The production of speech sounds across languages

Editorial: The production of speech sounds across languages

Schwerpunkt Medizingeschichte – Teil 3: Wechselwirkungen – Zum „Traité inédit de l'acupuncture et du Moxa chez les Japonais” in J. B. Sarlandières „Mémoires sur l’Électro-Puncture” (1825)

In 1825 Jean Baptiste Sarlandière published „Traité inédit de l'acupuncture et du Moxa chez les Japonais”. It was the second translation of a Japanese script on acupuncture and moxa disseminated in Europe. According to contemporaries and later generations, it reflects the common tradition of Japanese and Chinese. However, on closer inspection it turns out to be an eclectic text drawing on Chinese-Korean sources, having been shaped during a time of upheaval when the so-called traditional Japanese Medicine emancipated from the Chinese model and even picked up western elements. The history of emergence and transmission of this document demonstrates, on one side, the multifaceted character and the dynamics of medical development in Japan, while at the same time it shows the difficulties of its reception in Europe.

Globalisation, language planning and language rights: the recent script policy measures adopted by Japan and the People's Republic of China

In 2009, two significant script policy measures were adopted by Japan and the People's Republic of China (China hereafter), both as a response to national language needs triggered by globalisation. However, the measures chosen by the two countries were very different, Japan choosing to increase and China choosing to standardise the Chinese characters in the respective official character lists. The Japanese script reform measure was an integral part of Japan's recent national efforts to beautify the Japanese language and preserve the Japanese culture. The new script policy was implemented specifically to counteract the impact of digital media on the Japanese script which came about due to the globalisation process. The latest Japanese script reform thus drastically increased the number of official kanji (Chinese characters in the official character list), which had been substantially reduced in 1946 to facilitate mass literacy. In contrast, the Chinese script reform measure was an attempt to standardise and streamline its script to make it function effectively in digitalised environments. It was the centrepiece of China's current efforts to fast-track into the post-industrial knowledge economy and information society of the globalised, industrialised nations. The latest Chinese script reform thus rigorously weeded out large numbers of characters that had hitherto made its script untenable for computer use. Although the two language policy measures chosen to respond to the forces of globalisation are fundamentally different, both Japan and China are similar in the indifference shown towards language rights and social justice issues caused by their respective policies.

Translating canons: Shakespeare on the Noh stage

Translating intercultural theatre is a complex practice. When Shakespeare is adapted into Asian traditional performance styles, the canonicity of the English text confronts the authenticity of the canonical performances in Asia. This essay analyses the process of intercultural translation of King Lear: His Shadows, a Noh adaptation of King Lear directed by Kurita Yoshihiro. Through the archiving process of this production in a multilingual digital archive called Asian Shakespeare Intercultural Archive (A∣S∣I∣A), which provides English translation of the script, two dimensions of the intercultural translation can be observed: the translation and adaptation from Shakespeare's English text into Noh style in the process of the original production on the one hand, and the “reverse” translation of the Japanese script into English in the process of archiving on the other. Framing the former as the “translation in Asia” and the latter as the “translation of Asia,” I examine the characteristics of each translation and the interactions between these two processes, which demonstrate the strategies employed by the director to crystallize his appreciation of Shakespeare's play.

A survey on optical character recognition for Bangla and Devanagari scripts

The past few decades have witnessed an intensive research on optical character recognition (OCR) for Roman, Chinese, and Japanese scripts. A lot of work has been also reported on OCR efforts for various Indian scripts, like Devanagari, Bangla, Oriya, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam, Kannada, Gurmukhi, Gujarati, etc. In this paper, we present a review of OCR work on Indian scripts, mainly on Bangla and Devanagari—the two most popular scripts in India. We have summarized most of the published papers on this topic and have also analysed the various methodologies and their reported results. Future directions of research in OCR for Indian scripts have been also given.

Handling Japanese without a Japanese Operating System

The HyperCard environment of the Macintosh has become a popular platform for Japanese Language courseware because of its flexibility and ease of programming. However, due to the requirements for the KanjiTalk operating system and the difficulties in using Japanese scripts in the English environment system, the scope of the present courseware has been severely limited. This project involved creating Japanese bitmap font files for the JIS Levels 1 and 2, and writing XFCN's for font manipulation, Japanese kana input, and answer correction for the English system. With these tools, both the variety and quality of future development of Japanese language courseware will be improved.

Reforming Chinese characters in the PRC and Japan: New directions in the twenty-first century

This article provides a comparative evaluation of Chinese character reform in the People's Republic of China and Japan, with a particular focus on the latest changes announced in 2009 to the existing script policies in the two countries. The first Chinese script reform took place in 1956 and the first Japanese script reform in 1946, both for the purpose of simplifying the scripts to facilitate mass education. In the 1980s, prompted by nationalistic sentiments and economic security, both countries backtracked on their script reform policies and adopted a more conservative approach that put an end to any further simplification of the script. The conservative trend which continued into the new millennium is reflected in the two latest reforms. Both China and Japan have moved further away from phonetizing the script in their effort to address issues related to information and communication technology.

Lexical competition in a non-Roman, syllabic script: An inhibitory neighbour priming effect in Japanese Katakana

Previous masked priming studies have reported that lexical decision latencies are slower when a word target is primed by a higher-frequency neighbour (e.g., blue-BLUR) than when it is primed by an unrelated word of equivalent frequency (e.g., care-BLUR). These results suggest that lexical competition plays an important role in visual word identification in Indo-European languages such as English, French, and Dutch, consistent with activation-based accounts of lexical processing. The present research, using Japanese Katakana script, a syllabic script, demonstrates that lexical decision latencies were slower when targets were primed by word neighbour primes but not when targets were primed by nonword neighbour primes. Both results have clear parallels with previous research using Indo-European languages and therefore suggest that lexical competition is also an important component of word recognition processes in languages that do not employ the Roman alphabet.

Synesthetic Colors for Japanese Scripts in Japanese Synesthetes

The determinants of synesthetic colors for Japanese scripts were studied in six Japanese grapheme-color synesthetes. We investigated the influence of linguistic properties such as phonology, orthography, and meaning on synesthetic colors for logographic characters (Kanji), phonetic characters (hiragana and katakana), and digits. From a palette of 138 colors, the synesthetes selected colors for 79 Kanji, 71 hiragana, and 71 katakana characters, and 9 digits. The results revealed that the color choices for hiragana and katakana characters representing the same sound were remarkably consistent, indicating that color selection depended on phonology and not visual form. On the other hand, synesthetic colors for Kanji characters, which are usually learned later, depended on meaning and phonology. Kanji characters representing concepts that are highly related to colors (eg, names of objects with typical colors) were associated with those colors. Digits and corresponding Kanji numerals elicited strikingly similar colors. Colors for Kanji and hiragana characters sharing the same sound were likely to be similar. These results suggest that synesthetic colors are generalized from digits and phonetic scripts to Kanji characters via meaning and phonology. This study provides insights into the generalization of synesthetic colors to later acquired sets of graphemes within a language.

Fingerbraille: An Investigation of Japanese Methods for Communicating with Individuals who are Deaf-Blind

There are many techniques for communicating with individuals who are deaf-blind. In Japan, another technique, known as fingerbraille, is also used. Fingerbraille is a tactile method of communication that is based on Japanese braille script. This article introduces the reader to the history of the development of this communication technique and to the characteristics of its use by both individuals with deaf-blindness and professional interpreters, with the hope that its use will be expanded to other languages. COMMUNICATION AND DEAF-BLINDNESS People who are deaf-blind face severe difficulties in both communication and mobility. The emotional impact of breaking communication barriers between persons who are deaf-blind and persons without disabilities is evident from stories of famous individuals with deaf-blindness, such as Helen Keller. Helen Keller's story is well known around the world, and since the days of her advocacy, many breakthroughs have been made in the development of communication techniques for people who are deaf-blind (Keller, 2009). People like Helen Keller who lost their sight and hearing prelingually, as babies, are considered to be similar to those who were born deaf-blind. In this article, people who lost their sight first are referred to as having blindness-based deaf-blindness, and those who lost their hearing first are referred to as having deafness-based deaf-blindness. Although all individuals who are deaf-blind face similar challenges in terms of communicating and understanding their environments, each one has different needs. Compared to those who are congenitally or prelingually deaf-blind, individuals who have blindness-or deafness-based deaf-blindness have advantages when learning and using communication techniques. They typically have been offered educational and rehabilitation services on the basis of their first disability and may have learned some system of communication, such as sign language or braille, before they became deaf-blind. Thus, there is a need for a variety of communication methods for persons who are deaf-blind, with each method suited to different strengths (Spiers & Ehrlich, 2002). Fingerbraille is one such method. The initial single disability plays a strong role in determining the communication methods used by individuals with either blindness-or deafness-based deaf-blindness. Sign language, for instance, is considered difficult for persons with blindness-based deaf-blindness to learn because it is a primarily visual language. As a result of the highly idiosyncratic experiences of each individual, no single method for communicating could be equally effective for all those with deaf-blindness. Furthermore, no technique, such as tactile sign language, fingerspelling, or print-on-palm, is universally easier to learn or to use--all pose challenges. In the ongoing search for additional means of enabling people who are deaf-blind to communicate with others in real time, having more methods to choose from is critical for addressing individual needs. In several dimensions, including speed of conversation and ease of comprehension, fingerbraille is uniquely suited to people who have blindness-based deaf-blindness (Mitsunari, 2003). [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] THE DEVELOPMENT OF FINGERBRAILLE Fingerbraille was created in Japan in 1981 for use by people with deaf-blindness. In fingerbraille, the interpreter faces the individual who is deaf-blind from the side and uses touch-writing. The interpreter taps characters, in braille, onto the uppermost digit of the middle three fingers of each hand like the keys of a braille writer. The method of tapping is similar to that of typing on a Perkins Brailler or a braille notetaker, but it is an entirely tactile method of communication by the fingers on the fingers. It follows the traditional system in Japanese braille of hiragana and katakana characters, while omitting the Chinese kanji characters. …

The romantic fantasy and its vicissitudes: A self psychological reconsideration of “hysterical fantasy” and the eroticized transference

In this paper, I attempt to investigate the essential function of the romantic fantasy. I clearly differentiate the romantic fantasy from the sexual fantasy, and define the romantic fantasy as an archaic narcissistic fantasy in which a woman patient experiences herself as the only woman to whom a man is attracted and whom a man wishes to protect and support. As long as she believes that this fantasy is realizable, she experiences herself as being in the center of the world and she feels secure, protected, and whole. Based on a psychoanalytic consideration of a Japanese play script, Sotoba Komachi, I hypothesize that the essential function of the romantic fantasy is to deny the fear and pain of aging and death. Through a clinical vignette with a female patient, I prove the validity of my hypothesis and illustrate that a romantic fantasy provides for an individual a basic sense of security and a sense of immortality. I contend that a romantic fantasy functions to neutralize the destructive quality of a sexual fantasy and make it productive. In order to avoid confusion, I focus on romantic fantasies given by female patients, although a male patient can also develop a romantic fantasy.

Deep dyslexia for kanji and phonological dyslexia for kana: Different manifestations from a common source

A Japanese-speaking stroke patient with disrupted phonology but relatively good semantics was severely impaired in nonword reading, with better preserved and imageability-modulated word-reading in both kanji and kana. This basic similarity of reading in the two Japanese scripts was accompanied by the following differences: (i) distinct error patterns (prominent semantic errors for kanji vs. phonological errors for kana); (ii) a more pronounced imageability effect for kanji; and (iii) a remarkable pseudohomophone advantage for kana. The combination of deep dyslexia for kanji and phonological dyslexia for kana in a single patient suggests that these are not two distinct reading disorders.

Left-lateralized N170 Effects of Visual Expertise in Reading: Evidence from Japanese Syllabic and Logographic Scripts

The N170 component of the event-related potential (ERP) reflects experience-dependent neural changes in several forms of visual expertise, including expertise for visual words. Readers skilled in writing systems that link characters to phonemes (i.e., alphabetic writing) typically produce a left-lateralized N170 to visual word forms. This study examined the N170 in three Japanese scripts that link characters to larger phonological units. Participants were monolingual English speakers (EL1) and native Japanese speakers (JL1) who were also proficient in English. ERPs were collected using a 129-channel array, as participants performed a series of experiments viewing words or novel control stimuli in a repetition detection task. The N170 was strongly left-lateralized for all three Japanese scripts (including logographic Kanji characters) in JL1 participants, but bilateral in EL1 participants viewing these same stimuli. This demonstrates that left-lateralization of the N170 is dependent on specific reading expertise and is not limited to alphabetic scripts. Additional contrasts within the moraic Katakana script revealed equivalent N170 responses in JL1 speakers for familiar Katakana words and for Kanji words transcribed into novel Katakana words, suggesting that the N170 expertise effect is driven by script familiarity rather than familiarity with particular visual word forms. Finally, for English words and novel symbol string stimuli, both EL1 and JL1 subjects produced equivalent responses for the novel symbols, and more left-lateralized N170 responses for the English words, indicating that such effects are not limited to the first language. Taken together, these cross-linguistic results suggest that similar neural processes underlie visual expertise for print in very different writing systems.