Abstract
It has been argued that female speech in Japanese translation is overly feminized and the convention has had an important role in spreading gender ideology in society. A possible strategy to counteract this tendency might be to “de-feminize” women’s speech as a feminist translation strategy, as opposed to the ideologically encouraged convention. In practice, however, it seems difficult to realize de-feminizing translation. In this chapter Furukawa investigates an actual case which failed in de-feminizing a female character’s speech. The character Effie’s speech is analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively in unpublished translations and the accepted version of The Yellow Face (Conan Doyle 1893, tr. Yu Okubo 2008). Then a report on an interview with the translator helps provide insight into norms in the Japanese literary system.
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Notes
- 1.
The digital library Aozorabunko is a collection of the works that their copyrights are expired, and any texts on the website are open to public for free.
- 2.
There are more than 20 first person pronouns in Japanese and speakers choose one from them depending on their social background, gender , age, or the contexts .
- 3.
This chapter has dealt with the text published as an audio book, and did not investigate if there is any difference between printed books and audio books. Thus, this issue also needs to be investigated further.
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Furukawa, H. (2018). A De-feminized Woman in Conan Doyle’s The Yellow Face . In: Boase-Beier, J., Fisher, L., Furukawa, H. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Literary Translation. Palgrave Studies in Translating and Interpreting. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-75753-7_6
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