Japanese Translation Research Articles

Epigenetic profile of Japanese supercentenarians: a cross-sectional study

Centenarians and supercentenarians with exceptional longevity are excellent models for research towards improvements of healthy life expectancy. Extensive research regarding the maintenance and reduction of epigenetic age has provided insights into increasing healthy longevity. To this end, we explored the epigenetic signatures reflecting hallmarks of exceptional healthy longevity, including avoidance of age-related diseases and cognitive functional decline. In this cross-sectional study, we enrolled Japanese non-centenarians (eligible participants aged 20-80 years) from the Tohoku Medical Megabank Community-Based Cohort Study and centenarians and supercentenarians (aged 101-115 years) from the Tokyo Centenarian Study and the Japanese Semi-supercentenarian Study. We assessed participants' whole-blood DNA methylation profiles and then developed sex-specific and non-specific first-generation epigenetic clocks by elastic net regression, calculated individuals' epigenetic ages, and assessed their age acceleration. We also screened for age-related CpG sites in non-centenarians by epigenome-wide linear regression analyses and ANOVA. We subsequently investigated which CpG sites in centenarians and supercentenarians had DNA methylation patterns following the age-related findings obtained from non-centenarians and which did not. We further characterised CpG sites with hypermethylation or hypomethylation in the centenarians and supercentenarians using enrichment and protein-protein interaction network analyses. We enrolled 421 non-centenarians (231 [55%] women and 190 [45%] men; age range 20-78 years), recruited between May 20, 2013, and March 31, 2016, and 94 centenarians and supercentenarians (66 women [70%] and 28 [30%] men; age range 101-115 years), recruited between Jan 20, 2001, and April 17, 2018. Non-sex-specific epigenetic clock showed the highest accuracy (r=0·96) based on which centenarians and supercentenarians had negative epigenetic age acceleration. Epigenome-wide association analyses further showed that centenarians and supercentenarians had younger-than-expected epigenetic states (DNA methylation profiles similar to those of non-centenarians) for 557 CpG sites enriched in cancer-related and neuropsychiatric-related genes, whereas these individuals had advanced (or older) epigenetic states for 163 CpG sites represented by genes related to TGF-β signalling, which is involved in anti-inflammatory responses and known to contribute to healthy ageing. These results indicate that exceptionally healthy longevity depends not only on maintaining young epigenetic states but also on advanced states of specific epigenetic regions. The Japan Agency for Medical Research and Development, KDDI Research, and Keio University. For the Japanese translation of the abstract see Supplementary Materials section.

Epidemiological study of genitourinary syndrome of menopause in Japan (GENJA study).

This study aimed to investigate the prevalence of genitourinary syndrome of menopause (GSM) in Japan using the Japanese translation of the Vulvovaginal Symptoms Questionnaire (VSQ) with online survey. In addition, we examined the relationship between sexual activity and GSM symptoms. An online survey on GSM was conducted with 4,134 women aged 40 to 79 years, who were registered in an online survey company. Several questionnaires with Japanese translations of linguistic validity were used in this study. GSM was defined as a condition in women older than 40 years with vulvovaginal symptoms on the VSQ. The percentage of postmenopausal women 40 years and older was 69.6%. The percentage of women with sexual activity was 22%. The prevalence of GSM with vulvovaginal symptoms was 11.6%, and 31.7% in sexually active women. The prevalence of GSM was associated with age and was significantly lower in the 70s age group than in other age groups. Vulvar hurting and dryness were both age-related only in the sexual activity group, with a statistically significantly higher prevalence in the 70s group than in the 40s group. The prevalence of vulvar dryness during sexual activity was significantly lower in the 40s age group. An online epidemiological survey of GSM was conducted for the first time in Japan using the linguistically validated Japanese translation of the VSQ. The prevalence of GSM with genital or sexual symptoms was 11.6% in Japanese women 40 years and older, and 31.7% in sexually active women.

Japanese patients need slower, personalized clozapine titrations: A comment on the case described by Kikuchi et al.

Japanese patients need slower, personalized clozapine titrations: A comment on the case described by Kikuchi et al.

Jiang Guangci as a Translator of Russian Literature into Chinese

The translation activity of the founder of revolutionary Chinese literature, Jiang Guangci, is considered. The novelty of the study is due to the fact that the translations of Russian and Soviet literature by Jiang Guangci are almost not studied in scientific circles. The relevance of the study is due to the importance of building and strengthening Chinese-Russian cultural ties, including in the field of translation of fiction, in which Jiang Guangci was successful in the 20s of the XX century. It has been established that Jiang Guangci’s translations corresponded to his revolutionary ideals, which he embodied in his original works. It is noted that Jiang Guangci's worldview determined his choice of Russian and Soviet works embodying revolutionary ideals for translation. It is shown that his translations received wide support from young people due not only to the content, but also to the simple, understandable language of presentation. The participation of Jiang Guangci in the literary discussion about the translation strategy is presented. Due to his good knowledge of the Russian, he made translations from the original, and not from Japanese translations of Russian works. The authors come to the conclusion that the translation activity of Jiang Guangci has not been sufficiently studied and has prospects for study.

DEVELOPMENT OF JAPANESE TRANSLATION OF THE NEUROGENIC BLADDER SYMPTOM SCORE

(Objectives) To develop Japanese translations of the standard and short forms of the Neurogenic Bladder Symptom Score (Subjects and methods) The questionnaires were forward translated by a Japanese healthcare professional and non-medical professional and backward translated by two native English-speaking translators. Then, the products were harmonized by the participants involved in the translational processes. Finally, 15 persons with spinal cord lesions were interviewed to improve the provisional Japanese translations based on their suggestions. (Results) Throughout the forward and backward translations and their harmonization, no major translational problems were encountered, other than those attributable to differences in syntax between English and Japanese. The persons could complete the provisional Japanese translations of the standard and short forms in median 7.0 and 3.0 minutes, respectively. Although none of them reported difficulty in answering the questions, 6, 3, and 5 persons pointed out that the tenth question (the seventh question in the short form) and the answers to the nineteenth and twenty-second questions, respectively, were not easy to understand. Taking their suggestions into consideration, we finalized the Japanese translations with the help of a developer of the questionnaire as well as the back-translators. (Conclusions) After a multi-step review process, linguistically valid Japanese translations of the standard and short forms of the Neurogenic Bladder Symptom Score (Neurogenic Bladder Symptom Score Japanese version 1.0) were completed. We hope that these Japanese translations will facilitate future research on patient-reported outcomes in persons with neurogenic lower urinary tract dysfunction.

Research on the Training of Japanese Translation Talents in Colleges and Universities under the Background of New Liberal Arts

The introduction of the new liberal arts is an important change in the traditional humanities and social sciences. Therefore, it is one of the important development goals of Japanese translation teaching in Colleges and universities at this stage to effectively utilize the national strategy of the new liberal arts construction and respond to the innovative challenges of the new liberal arts construction. Under the background of the new liberal arts, the training of Japanese translation talents in Colleges and universities needs to accelerate the innovation of training methods within the community. This paper interprets the background and connotation of the new liberal arts, and analyzes the effective countermeasures for the cultivation of Japanese translation talents in Colleges and Universities Based on the main problems existing in the current Japanese translation teaching in Colleges and universities.

Cognitive transformation of artistic images in Japanese translations of F. M. Dostoevsky: experience in digital analysis

The phenomenon of "Dostoevsky and Japan" is the subject of active consideration by specialists in Dostoevsky studies all over the world. Translations of his works into Japanese continue to cause numerous discussions of translators and literary critics, both face-to-face and indirect. One of the central topics for discussion is the problem of the artistic image in the texts of F.M. Dostoevsky, which is usually considered using traditional methods of philological analysis while the linguistic study of literary texts is gaining attention in literary studies. The methods of corpus and computer linguistics reveal various trends, statistically significant patterns, etc., which is becoming more and more in demand in various areas of philological interest: in studying the dynamics of plot development, analyzing the rhythmic organization of texts, in studies of grammatical and lexical features of the writer's personal style and other areas. The use of digital humanities’ technologies in addition to the tasks associated with data processing makes it possible to formalize these tasks to state the texts’ problems in the language of algorithms. In this article the mechanisms of cognitive transformation of the image of Rodion Raskolnikov from the novel by F.M. Dostoevsky "Crime and Punishment" will be studied using the methods of big data analysis. The current study was carried out on the material of the author's parallel corpus of Russian-Japanese translations, where the sentences containing propositional attitudes unusual for the Japanese language were selected: the elements of the influence of an inanimate subject on a person. This will help to trace how the Japanese language represents the confrontation between the Human and the external Force representing the inanimate world; to draw conclusions about the formation of typified linguistic experience in Japanese speakers’ mental space. Besides, the ways of cognitive transformation of artistic images of foreign literature in the Japanese representation will be considered.

翻译功能目的论视角下景区公示语的日语翻译问题研究——以福州三坊七巷为例

翻译功能目的论视角下景区公示语的日语翻译问题研究——以福州三坊七巷为例

Japanese Translation of the Pocket Guide Version of Society for Vascular Surgery Clinical Practice Guidelines on the Management of Visceral Aneurysms

Japanese Translation of the Pocket Guide Version of Society for Vascular Surgery Clinical Practice Guidelines on the Management of Visceral Aneurysms

Exploration of the Japanese Translation of In Hard Times in the Perspective of Eco-translatology Theory

Exploration of the Japanese Translation of In Hard Times in the Perspective of Eco-translatology Theory

Pipeline Signed Japanese Translation Using PBSMT and Transformer in a Low-Resource Setting

We propose a novel pipeline method for translating signed Japanese sentences into written Japanese. Sign languages often suppress functional words such as particles, and most words are not morphologically inflected as they are in spoken languages. Our method explicitly compares and contrasts the two languages and divides the translation process into two tasks: first, it translates glosses into lemmatized Japanese words or phrases, followed by complementing particles and conjugating predicates such as verbs, auxiliary verbs, and adjectives. Our method is especially effective when the size of the parallel corpus is very limited and costly to obtain, but there are plenty of monolingual corpora for the target. Specifically, our method first uses phrase-based statistical machine translation (PBSMT) to map sign glosses to corresponding Japanese words or phrases, and then employs a transformer-based neural machine translation (NMT) model trained with a monolingual corpus to refine the output in the first translation. Experimental results show that our pipeline method outperforms direct PBSMT and competitive NMT models with data augmentation, including back-translation and transfer learning in a low-resource setting with a corpus size on the order of 104 words.

Z japońskiej perspektywy

FROM A JAPANESE PERSPECTIVE: THE WESTERN INFLUENCES IN THE WORKS OF ŌGAI
 The article focuses on how Mori Ōgai (1862-1922), a Japanese writer, translator and literary critic, incorporated references to European literature and culture in his novellas: Maihime (The Dancing Girl, 1890), Mōsō (Delusion, 1911) and Hanako (1910). The hermeneutic approach sheds light on the Japanese author’s vivid interest in foreign languages, cultural symbols, philosophy and arts which contributes to the intricate image of foreign influences in his oeuvre and invite his readers and translators in Europe to revisit their own cultural tradition.

Kilka uwag o japońskim przekładzie Pieśni o zamordowanym żydowskim narodzie Jicchoka Kacenelsona

SOME REMARKS ON THE JAPANESE TRANSLATION OF THE SONG OF THE MURDERED JEWISH PEOPLE BY YITSKHOK KATSENELSON
 The aim of the text is to present the Japanese translation of Yitskhok Katsenelson’s Song of the murdered Jewish people, authored by two Germanists, Masatomo Asukai and Kazuyuki Hosomi, published in 1999 under the title Horobosareta Yudaya no tami no uta by the Tokyo publishing house Misuzu. In addition to providing details of the publication itself, as well as the profiles of the translators and the background to the creation of the Japanese edition, the linguistic aspect of the translation is discussed in particular, focusing on problems of versification, the syntactic devices used and the choice of vocabulary. The article provides a more detailed analysis of selected, albeit representative, fragments of the translation, as varied in content and style as possible. Some space has also been given to the critical apparatus of the Japanese edition, i.e. comments, footnotes, afterwords etc., as well as to translations of the titles of individual parts of The song…

Personal and Animal Names in Japanese and Russian Texts Translated from a Fantasy Novel

This paper analyzed a Russian translation text and the Japanese translation text of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone from the viewpoint of Descriptive Translation Studies proposed by Toury (1995). First, the present researchers situated the texts within the target culture systems, looking at their acceptability. The results revealed that although Japanese and Russian famous bookstore companies categorized the translated books as children’s literature, the Japanese version’s translator did not choose a certain readership and the Russian version’s translator and publishing company categorized it as роман, namely novel. In the Russian-speaking world, not children but adolescence people and adults usually read роман. Second, the present authors surveyed translation features of personal and animal names in the Japanese and Russian translation versions of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s stone. Based on the seven translation procedures that Davies (2003) proposed (i.e., Preservation, Addition, Globalization, Omission, Localization, Transformation, and Creation), the present researchers classified the names and counted the number of each of the translation procedures. The results showed that Preservation was most frequently used in both the Japanese and Russian texts. In the Japanese translation version, the percentage of Preservation was about 80%. In the Russian translation version, the percentage of Preservation was about 50% and the percentage of Localization was about 30%. The Russian translator used Preservation and Localization frequently. According to Jaleniauskienė and Čičelytė (2009), Preservation was the procedure that emphasized the Source language and Localization was the procedure that emphasized the Target language. These results showed that the Russian translation version put more emphasis on the Target language than the Japanese translation version.

Japanese Slang Translation Technique in Indonesian Subtitle Anime Asobi Asobase

Asobi Asobe anime shows the phenomenon of translating slang from the otaku group and the language of young people (wakamono kotoba) in Indonesian subtitles. Slang has links to certain social groups in every culture. Slang translation needs to consider the differences between the social situation of the home culture and the target culture. The proper translation technique is needed in order to be able to translate slang from the source language to the target language. This research intends to describe the techniques used in translating Japanese slang terms in the Indonesian subtitles of the Asobi Asobe anime. The types of translation techniques found are adaptation and modulation. Adaptation is found on 9 data, more than modulation found on 2 data. Adaptation is made by matching Japanese slang words with Indonesian colloquial words, while modulation is made when there are no appropriate equivalents for the Japanese slang words in colloquial Indonesian.

NOTICES

NOTICES

Correction: Japanese Translations of In the Clinic

Correction: Japanese Translations of In the Clinic

Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass, and US Slave Narratives in Translation in East Asia

The paper presents a conceptual map of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese translations of Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass, and Solomon Northup from 1920 to the present. It considers the problems and advantages of a regional East Asian translation history, including issues of internationalism, sharing mass traumas and resistances, ideological misappropriation, reader reception, and de-centering analytic binarisms. The paper then turns to paratexts to discuss the numerous translations of Washington’s Up from Slavery, particularly the social development messages these translations sought to promote throughout East Asia. Given declining reader interest in Booker T. Washington in the twenty-first century, it then examines the more recent popularity of Frederick Douglass in translation editions as a symbolic leader of resistance against slavery. A conclusion addresses the East Asian translation history of Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave and the contemporary status of translated slave narratives as a global commodity.

출애굽기 4:10의 번역 제안과 이해 ― “입이 뻣뻣하고 혀가 둔한 자”를 중심으로 ―

Translating a biblical passage is always a new challenge and difficult task that requires continuous thinking and choosing. Nevertheless, biblical scholars have the responsibility to willingly walk that path. In this article, I deal with Exodus 4:10 where Moses refuses YHWH’s calling by saying, “I am heavy of mouth and tongue.” The Korean Bible (1911) translates this sentence as “입도 둔하고 혀도 둔한쟈니이다”, which means “I have clumsy mouth and a tongue.” The Korean Revised Version (1938) reads “나는 입이 뻣뻣하고 혀가 둔한 자니이다”, which means “I am stiff of mouth and clumsy of tongue.” The MT reads “I am heavy of mouth and heavy of tongue”, but the foreign missionaries and their Korean assistants who worked on The Korean Bible did not know Hebrew, so they did not consult MT when they translated Exodus into Korean. Instead, they consulted Bibles in English, Chinese, and Japanese available at the time of translation. Therefore, I will look into these Bibles, and try to find some influences from them.BR First, English Bibles translate the phrase as “slow of mouth and tongue”. This means the Hebrew word kbd was translated into slow instead of heavy. So the relationship between the first Korean Bible and those English Bibles seems to be very weak. Second, the Chinese Bibles did not use the word 重 (meaning heavy), but instead used 拙 since the publication of the Delegates’ Version (1856). This Chinese character 拙 means slow or clumsy. Therefore these Chinese Bibles could have influenced The Korean Bible (1911). It was tragic when this translation was changed in the Korean Revised Version (1938) without any reasonable basis. The latter translation does not carry the MT meaning at all.BR In the case of the Japanese Bibles, Meiji Version (1887) uses the word 重, and it shows that the Japanese Bible translators got away from the influences of the Chinese Bibles and walked in their way. They might have tried to translate the sentence from MT. They did not choose the suitable translations from available Bibles (English, Chinese), but tried to translate the sentence as closely as possible to MT. In conclusion, Moses’s words in Exodus 4:10 needs to be either retranslated like the one in The Korean Bible (1911) or to do a round translation like “I am not eloquent.”

Health-Related Expectations Regarding Aging among Middle-Aged and Older Japanese: Psychometric Performance and Novel Findings from the ERA-12-J.

Background and objectives: Health-related expectations regarding aging is a gerontological construct that is potentially predictive of morbidity and mortality in later life. The Expectations Regarding Ageing scale (ERA-12) is a widely used measure of health-related expectations, although it has not previously been administered in Japanese. The present research aimed to elucidate the psychometric properties of the first Japanese translation of the ERA-12 and evaluate health-related expectations among middle-aged and older Japanese. Research design and methods: Repeated online surveys were conducted with representative quota samples of middle-aged and older adults in Tokyo during 2021 (N = 1600). Primary outcome measures included total and subscale scores on a Japanese translation of the ERA-12 (ERA-12-J) addressing perceptions of physical, mental, and cognitive health. Standard measures were also used to gather information regarding respondent demographic details, general health, and health-related behavior. Results: The ERA-12-J and associated subscales showed acceptable test-retest reliability (t(1598) = 0.60, p = 0.63), internal consistency (α > 0.80), inter-item correlation (r = 0.21–0.78) and item-total correlation (r = 0.53–0.73). Confirmatory Factor Analysis verified the hypothesized three-factor structure and construct validity on four common indices of fit (GFI = 0.968; CFI = 0.978; AGFI = 0.950; RMSEA = 0.059). ERA-12-J scores among Japanese respondents revealed prevailing negative sentiments concerning physical and cognitive health, with less negative sentiment regarding mental health. Significant and independent differences emerged concerning gender and age cohort, with middle-aged adults and females holding more negative expectations about their future health. Discussion and implications: The ERA-12-J provides a sound basis for the elucidation of health-related expectations about aging in Japan and a useful tool for international comparative studies. Education and workplace intervention may be required in Japan to address age and gender disparities in health-related expectations.