情報フィルターとしての翻訳

“Translation as a Filter of Information - Proposal for a target manipulation in translating picture books into Japanese”

On English to Japanese translation of children’s books, in particular, picture books, the author examines in this paper a case, in which the targeted readers are set up to be parallel to what are assumed in the original text, and another case, in which the translated text is designed to have different functions, different from those the original text had, through target manipulation by the translators. The author theoretically and educationally analyzes the latter case and makes propositions. In translating picture books into Japanese, the contents of semantic meaning that the original text had are frequently lost in the process of translation, except certain proper names, events and customs. What to translate and what not to translate is a translator’s choice and it determines the legitimacy of a translated product. In this paper, the author observes translator’s “domestication” strategy (Venuti 1995: 20) introducing texts translated by students of a translation course, and discuses the filtration effect a translated text provides in the communication between different languages and cultures. The author tries to clarify the functions that today’s translated Japanese texts serve as to the manipulation capability and filtering effect of translation, which takes in language expressions and cultural events that did not exist in Japanese.