Academic literature on the topic 'Japanese language Transliteration'

This paper shows how the so-called lower case katakana writing is utilized for the transliteration of loanwords in Japanese, avoiding unpermitted phonological sequences. In order to adapt the foreign ti, di, tu, du, hu sequences, Japanese orthography employs lowercase writing (i. e., written in “small letters”) to preserve the phonological entity of the target words in the transliteration, e. g., disko “disco” → <deisko>, feis “face” → <ɸue:su>. That is, the diphthongal representations have to depend on special symbols, i. e., lowercase glides. Due to many complexities, Japanese writing system, especially the Romanization, is regarded as one of the most complicated systems which cannot be accounted for in a simple way. In order to provide a unified account on this issue, we employ the framework of Optimality Theory and show what kinds of constraints and their ranking relations are required the Japanese lowercase writing. We here claim that vowel correspondence is ranked higher than consonantal correspondence in Japanese lowercase writing. Moreover, the preservation of mora is another important factor in loan adaptation. Furthermore, the constraint ranking is different, depending on the period of adaptation; the new and old loanwords are realized differently from each other, although they have the same phonemic inputs.

This article aims to show how the Nuclear disaster in Fukushima (3 March 2011) affected Japanese Language teaching and learning in Italy, focusing on the ITADICT Project (Marcella Mariotti, project leader, Clemente Beghi, research fellow and Alessandro Mantelli, programmer). The project intends to develop the first Japanese-Italian online database, involving more than 60 students of Japanese language interested in lexicographic research and online learning strategies and tools. A secondary undertaking of ITADICT is its Latin alphabet transliteration of Japanese words into Hepburn style. ITADICT is inspired by EDICT Japanese-English database developed by the Electronic Dictionary Research and Development Group established in 2000 within the Faculty of Information Technology at Monash University. The Japanese-Italian database is evolving within the Department of Asian and North African Studies at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, the largest in the country and one of the main teaching centres of Japanese in Europe in terms of the number of students dedicated to it (1800) and number of Japanese language teaching hours (1002h at B.A. level, and 387h at M.A. level). In this paper we will describe how and why the project has been carried out and what the expectations are for its future development.

Communicating with Chinese, Japanese, and Korean users in English is a challenge for Russians, even if they have a perfect command of English. This is due to the fact that while performing a global function and retaining local features, the English language, non-native to its users, has specific phonetic features revealed as an accent in oral speech, as well as certain graphic innovations, which aggravates translating proper names and culture-loaded words into Russian in a written form of communication. The challenges result from co-existence of several transliteration systems in these languages, non-traditional sound and letter correlations as compared with British and American Englishes, non-traditional translation correlations when transliterating from Roman to Cyrillic. Translation problems proper are complicated by lexico-semantic and pragmatic factors, which can be interpreted only on the cultural basis. These challenges make it necessary to integrate the World Englishes paradigm into the courses of English departments, as well as preparing special textbooks and reference sources.

This study focuses on the role of James Curtis Hepburn (1815–1911), the pioneer Presbyterian missionary doctor in Japan and a lexicographer who gave his name to the standard form of transliteration of Japanese into English, in the translation of the New Testament into Japanese. Hepburn’s earlier experiences as a medical missionary in China had a significant impact on his attitude toward language study and translation work after his arrival in Kanagawa in 1859. This study shows the importance of the Chinese language Christian tracts, and Bible translations made by China missionaries in serving as a cultural bridge to help open and to expedite the transmission of Christian and Western ideas into Japan as Hepburn and his missionary colleagues struggled to master the Japanese language and to translate the Gospels. However, after 1873 when the open propagation of Christianity among the Japanese began, the greater fluency of missionaries in Japanese and the growing desire of the Japanese to learn English and to concentrate on Western rather than Chinese learning led to the decline in the importance of Chinese language both in the evangelization of Japan and in Bible translation.

The transfer of sound from one language into another is not a uniform process, but rather, takes different forms depending on the orthographies and phonological properties of source and target languages, the less common of which involve processes significantly different from transliteration between European phonetic scripts. This paper pools techniques commonly used in loanword phonology and second language acquisition to illustrate complications that arise when translating names from English into languages such as Japanese and Chinese, which differ significantly from the source language in syllable structure and orthographic convention. Competing strategies of adaptation and accommodation are placed in the context of lexical retrieval and compared with experimental studies of nativization in interlanguage. It will be shown that for names to be perceived as similar-sounding across language boundaries, it would be desirable to look beyond segmental equivalence and consider stress, syllable count and other suprasegmental factors that play a greater role in phonological memory.

Abstract Courtesy ( politeness ) is one of the recalled strategies to maintain good relations between speaker and hearer . In this study, politeness is defined as the awareness of speakers will image the hearer; a concept called ‘the face’ (Brown and Levinson, 1987). To express politeness, one of which is realized with indirect speech act (TTL), for example, to declare a function directive, speakers can use direct speech (TL) with the imperative sentences and use TTL with declarative or interrogative sentences. This study aims to find a form of directive utterances in Japanese as well as politeness strategies. The benefit of this research is to provide choice to the learner how to speak Japanese, especially for express orders using TTL. Data obtained through the identification process to find speech that is suspected to contain commands mean. This step begins by identifying and marking the discourse in the form of dialogues that contains the event said directive . Directive speech is then transcribed (romanization) , which over the alphabet of Japanese characters into Latin letters. After transcription, triangulation to native speakers. Subsequently translation (transliteration) of the Japanese language as the source language (BS) into the Indonesian language as the target (BT). The translation process includes : (1) translation literally, is glossed words each forming the speech or discourse; (2) a free translation, the translation is bound context that focuses on BT. This is done so that the translation is communicative. Based on the results of the study found seven forms of expression TTL directive to express politeness in Japanese , namely : Form [ VTE ] , [ ~ mashō ] , [ ~ kara ] , [ ~ te hoshii ] , [ ~ yattorun ? ] , [ ~ U / yo ] , and [ ~ yoni suru shikanai ] . Keywords : command ; TTL ; politeness ; directive ; imperative

Abstract This paper explores how translation of foreign film titles has been carried out in South Korea since foreign films first arrived in Korea following its emancipation from Japanese colonial rule. With reference to audiovisual translation in general and film or screen translation in particular, this paper discusses the extent of the mistakes made by Korean translators due to a lack of thorough contextual knowledge of the source language and culture. Most Korean translations of foreign films result in strange, surreal, and at best funny adaptations. Discussion regarding “bad,” total, or almost total mistranslations focuses on (1) words with multiple meanings (homonyms and heteronyms); (2) slang and colloquial expressions; (3) words with culturally specific features; and (4) proper nouns and common nouns. This paper concludes that in an era of globalization, film title translation in Korea increasingly shows a trend towards transliteration rather than translation – either literal or liberal.

Japonica in the Archives Left After Bronisław Piłsudski in the Cracow Pau-Pan Academic Library 8. Kimiko Torii’s Letter To Bronisław and Mitsugo Yokoyama’s Letter Written on Board S/S Dakota The present material constitutes the eighth installment of the presentation of Japanese documents preserved with Bronisław Piłsudski’s archives in the Academic Library of the Polish Academy of Sciences and Lettres (PAU) and Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN) in Cracow and includes two letters in facsimile, transliteration, and interpretation in Polish. The first of them has been written in Japanese but in Roman characters (rōmaji) with few insertions in French. Its author, Kimiko Torii was the wife of the renowned Japanese ethnographer and anthropologist Ryūzō Torii who traveled extensively and conducted fieldwork in many places studying numerous cultures, the Ainu, especially the Kuril Ainu, included. Bronisław was personally acquainted with the couple – Ryuzo translated (from German) and published Bronisław’s work “The Aborigines of Sakhalin” (English translation in CWBP 1, 222–235), and Bronisław went to the railway station in Tokyo to see Kimiko off on her way to Mongolia to join her husband there – both conducted research in that country but the primary reason for Kimiko was to go on invitation from a local prince to Harqin (today in Inner Mongolia in China) to replace another Japanese lady in teaching in a school for Mongolian, primarily the prince’s, children – Misako Kawahara. Both ladies left several memoir publications each on their stay and experience accumulated in Mongolia, Kimiko coauthored also some works of academic importance with Ryuzo. Basic data on all the three persons and details concerning some of the publications mentioned have been provided. The letter is personal and, explaining circumstances, constitutes a plea for excuse for failed encounter on a snowy winter evening (beginning of February 1906) at the Toriis’. The other letter has been written by a person from Hiroshima Prefecture named Mitsugo Yokoyama who happened to board S/S Dakota on the way from Japan to the USA as a stowaway. Freezing while in hiding, he was offered a warm blanket from “a Russian” which helped him to survive. The letter does not mention the donor’s name and was probably written as sort of a statement for the captain but also as a letter of the deepest gratitude toward the “Russian”. Finding the moving letter in Cracow allows a supposition that it had been handed over to Piłsudski by its receiver. Kazuhiko Sawada succeeded in tracing the lot of the then lucky beneficiary who survived the journey and his and his family hard times in America (he had six children, five of them allegedly still alive in 2005). Some remarks on the language of the letters and on Bronisław’s nature have also been made. It is the first among all so-far published installments in the Japonica series emerging in co-authorship: Ms. Anna Grądzka prepared the tentative versions of the decipherment of the manuscript originals, and their transliterations and translations within the framework of her MA thesis in Japanese studies at Nicoalus Copernicus University in Toruń.

The first part of this article reviews the differences between the Chinese, Korean and Japanese languages, and explains the importance of Buddhist texts in the history of these languages, especially in the development of written languages in Korea and Japan. The kugyol tradition (a convention for adding Korean grammatical markers at appropriate places to aid the reading of originally Chinese texts) is then explained with concrete examples in three parts: eumdok kugyol (transliteration kugyol), seokdok kugyol (translation kugyol), and jeomto seokdok-kugyol (traslation kugyol with point marks). The latest developments in kugyol research were seen in the 21st century, after the discovery of Yugasijiron in the year 2000, including the detailed point maps. Some questions concerning the jeomto seokdok-kugyol are still open.