De-Feminising Translation: Making Women Visible in Japanese Translation

Furukawa, Hiroko (2010) De-Feminising Translation: Making Women Visible in Japanese Translation. Doctoral thesis, University of East Anglia.

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Abstract

When feminist translation is discussed, it tends to be proposing a feminising
translation strategy to give women their own voice. My thesis, however, presents
a de-feminising translation. This results from the over-feminising convention in
Japanese literature, both original and translated. Female characters’ speech has
been over-feminised despite the dissonance with real Japanese women’s
language use, and the convention has reinforced and maintained gender
ideology in Japanese society.
My study offers theoretical description and a prescriptive approach. In the
theoretical description, I offer empirical and statistical analyses to describe the
over-feminising convention, which is a new contribution in this research area. I
also investigate the history of the convention and its function in society from an
ideological perspective, and then explore translation problems of the convention.
The systematic explanation of the translation problems in relation to the overfeminising
convention is also a new area of research in translation studies. The
prescriptive approach is an attempt to integrate theories into practical translation
by presenting an empirical de-feminising translation.
Through my project, I have become aware that when western feminist theory is
used in the Japanese context, we should adjust the idea to the recipient culture.
Feminism, in the western sense, has not been widely accepted in Japanese culture
and there is a danger in presenting a radical feminist translation. Having worked
as a book editor in Tokyo, Japan, I am aware that most of the publishers cannot
ignore the commercial side of the book business. Thus, if I translated a text with a
radical feminist approach, it might not be accepted by the intended readership
and this is not my aim. Therefore, the proposed strategy searches for the best
balance between an academic approach and commercial acceptance.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Arts and Humanities > School of Literature and Creative Writing (former - to 2011)
Depositing User:	Users 2259 not found.
Date Deposited:	13 Mar 2014 10:04
Last Modified:	13 Mar 2014 10:04
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/48143
DOI:

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