Paper short abstract:

The paper will aim to collect some Yiddish words which seem untranslatable or very difficult to translate, and to investigate the way they are rendered into Japanese. This will be done with the example of the Japanese translation of "The song of the murdered Jewish people" by Y. Katsenelson.

Paper long abstract:

The proposed paper will aim to collect some words which seem untranslatable or very difficult to translate (at least as far as can be judged on the basis of several European-language versions which simply make use of borrowings), and to investigate the way they are rendered into Japanese. The instance chosen for this purpose will be a Yiddish text which vividly shows the creative Japanese approach to words specific to a very distant language, namely such words that reflect the culture, religion and everyday life of the Jewish speakers. The Japanese strategy, in many respects quite a unique one, will be demonstrated with the example of Asukai Masatomo and Hosomi Kazuyuki's 1999 translation of "The song of the murdered Jewish people" (Dos lid fun oysgehargetn yidishn folk) by Yitskhok Katsenelson (1885/86-1944). The solutions chosen by these two translators for the Japanese version contrast quite sharply with the corresponding English, German, French or other European renderings.

Words which do not lend themselves to an easy translation are often "disposed of" in Europe by leaving them as they stand (i.e. they are adopted as loanwords), while in Japanese a vast array of new formations (including calques), descriptive phrases, approximate native equivalents and other devices are used side by side with borrowings, although the former are clearly more frequent than the latter. The following two examples, tendentiously selected, may serve as good illustrations: Yiddish (di) bime די בימה is rendered as German (die) Bima, English Bimah, Italian (la) bimà, Russian бима, Polish bima; and Yiddish (der) shames דער שמשׂ is rendered as German (der) Schammes, French (le) chamach, Italian (lo) shames, Russian шамес, Polish szames (now the reader of the present abstract may take a short break to check on Wikipedia what these words mean). But in the Japanese translation the equivalents are, respectively, sekkyōdan 説教壇 and dōmori 堂守, both of which can be roughly understood even without consulting a dictionary. In the proposed paper, these various devices used in the Japanese translation will be collected, analysed as for their structure and compared with some of their European counterparts.