APPROACH TO YAKUWARII-GO OR JAPANESE ROLE LANGUAGE FROM THE DIDACTICS OF TRANSLATOR TRAINING

Abstract

Yakuwari-go is a concept defined by Kinsui in 2003 as a series of speech language used in the world of fiction such as novels, manga, anime, etc., which evokes certain stereotypical characters. Recognizing its inevitable implications in literary genre translation (Kinsui, 2011b), some contrastive studies have been published between Japanese texts and translation into foreign languages. However, very few studies have approached this topic from the perspective of translator training. In this context, the aim of the present work is to find out the attitudes and opinions of Spanish students towards yakuwari-go translation, as a first step to consider their learning in translator training. The work consists of the following steps: The theoretical framework begins with the definition of yakuwari-go and its linguistic characteristics, followed by a general review of previous research, with special attention to Fukushima's (2014) contrastive analysis conducted between Japanese and Spanish. Next, a hypothesis is formulated about the difficulties that basic-level Japanese learners would face, and some solutions are proposed. Next, a didactic unit designed based on that hypothesis and the development of its implementation are presented, and finally, the results of a questionnaire answered by the students are analyzed. The results showed that more than 87% of the participants had no knowledge of yakuwari-go before the unit, but through the unit they understood the peculiarity of Japanese role expressions and their functioning as an important factor for the translator, so they all agreed on the need to acquire knowledge about them. It has also been observed that they became aware of the translating strategies, as well as the translator's work as a cultural mediator.