Linguistic Mysteries in a Swedish village and on a Japanese island : A corpus-based translation study on Japanese translationese by Swedish to Japanese translation

Sammanfattning: This paper aims to study translationese in the Japanese language, and to study if there are any differences between Swedish to Japanese translations compared with English to Japanese translations– which are studied more. Claimed features and characteristics of Japanese translationese include the increase use of personal pronouns, loanwords and paragraph length. However in this study the usage of formal language and gender language in translationese will also be included to in order to distinguish differences between translationese and non-translationese. The method used to analyze the material is corpus-based translations studies which is a rather newly developed method to study translation and especially translationese. This method will be used in this thesis to compare translated and non-translated texts. As material two novels are used – one originally written in Japanese, and one originally written in Swedish but translated into Japanese. Due to the lack of translation corpora in Japanese, the novels had to be digitalized in order for the author to browse in the novels. By comparing two novels of the same genre it will be clear what the translated novel lack compared to the non-translated novel as translationese is considered broken or bad translation. The analysis and the comparison will be done with the theories about the features of Japanese translationese. The study found that some of the features of translationese were adoptable on Swedish to Japanese translated texts, but there were few significant differences regarding formal language and gender language.