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Japanese Language in Fiction and Translation

Please join us on 7 May for a Japanese Studies Centre webinar featuring Monash PhD Graduate Dr. Hayden Trowell, Monash University's Dr. Satoshi Nambu and Osaka University's Professor Satoshi Kinsui for an event entitled

Japanese Language in Fiction and Translation

FRIDAY 7 MAY 2021

5.30-7.00pm (Australian Eastern Standard time)

4.30-6.00pm (Japan time)

To join the zoom seminar please register:

Via this link

ABSTRACT

In Japanese literature and media, speech styles used to portray fictional characters vary greatly depending on a wide range of attributes, such as gender, age, social status, and occupation. Various combinations of linguistic resources in the speech styles have become conventionalized, serving to assist audiences in identifying stereotypical attributes of characters, a phenomenon that Prof. Kinsui has termed “role language” (yakuwarigo). Adopting a sociolinguistic perspective, Dr. Trowell and Dr. Nambu will report a study on how role language and Japanese dialects are used to render the speech of Black enslaved characters in three Japanese translations of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. Our invited speaker, Prof. Kinsui will analyze the way the commendatore speaks in Haruki Murakami’s Killing Commendatore, and examine the ways in which the translators have translated his way of speaking into English.

Invited speaker: Professor Satoshi Kinsui

Professor Kinsui is a Japanese linguist at Osaka University and currently the president of the Society for Japanese Linguistics. In 2020, he was selected as a member of the Japan Academy.

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