Paper short abstract:

We conducted a questionnaire survey regarding "the expressions of taste" of native speakers of three Asian languages (Thai, Chinese, and Korean) who share a common food culture. how is taste expressed in Asian languages?Is there commonality between the three languages in terms of the sense of taste?

Paper long abstract:

It has been identified that a characteristic of Japanese is the overwhelmingly large number of texture expressions such as onomatopoeic words, especially "saku-saku" and "puri-puri." According to Hayakawa (2006), Japanese has 445 such words, while French has 226 and Finnish has 71; in other words, in Japanese, synesthetic expressions of "tactile → taste," which express a taste using a tactile sense, are frequently used. Based on these characteristics of Japanese, in this presentation, we conducted a questionnaire survey regarding "the expressions of taste" of native speakers of three Asian languages (Thai, Chinese, and Korean) who share a common food culture. Based on the results, the following points were verified. 1．Verification of diversity: In Japanese, expressions of "tactile → taste" are often used, but how is taste expressed in Asian languages? 2．Verification of commonality: Is there commonality between the three languages in terms of the sense of taste? To examine the above, we conducted a questionnaire survey for native speakers of each language. Sixty native speakers of each language were asked to freely write about the foods in the list of 150 foods that could be expressed in their language. As a result, for example, 1,423 kinds of taste expressions were obtained in Chinese. A classification of these expressions using the Japanese taste words classification table led to the following finding: in addition to "tactile → taste" expressions such as "hard and soft" expressions, "smell → taste" expressions such as "aromatic" expressions turned out to be heavily used. Furthermore, the obtained results were compared with those in Japanese, and the characteristics of Japanese taste expressions were clarified. The results of this research can be used in the field of Japanese language education, allowing one to objectively view the perspective of things that have entered into each language.

Paper short abstract:

This report presents a creative drama activity utilizing a Japanese legend "Yamata no Orochi" in an adult education class and its findings from the viewpoint of fostering of plurilingual and pluricultural competence guided by Byram's model and FREPA.

Paper long abstract:

This report presents a creative drama activity utilizing a Japanese legend "Yamata no Orochi" in an adult education class and its findings from the viewpoint of fostering of plurilingual and pluricultural competence.

During this activity the learners encounter the world of Japanese myth and experience the worldview contained in the story from the inside through drama works (Watanabe 2014) . Inspired by this and based on their textual understanding, the learners then create and perform their own story, while discussing verbal and nonverbal expressions in both German and Japanese, and if necessary, recieving support from the teacher applying techniques of Psychodramaturgie Linguistique (Dufeu 2003) .

Opposite to other types of drama activities in which learners play a skits written all by themselves or perform a given Japanese theater after the native speaker model, the creative drama activity provides a device for collaborative and expressive experiences, as the learners move back and forth between fiction and reality, languages and cultures of their own and others. Watabe (2016) argues that such dynamic, embodied learning experience go beyond solely cognitive and rather static understanding and foster the ability to understand and co-exist with other cultures.

In this presentation, I examine if/how the creative drama brought about learners' discoveries and changes in awareness in regard to cultures and languages on the basis of classroom observations, reflections on teaching and learner interviews, guided by Byram's model (2015) of pluricultural competence for citizenship education in Europe and FREPA (Framework of Reference for Pluralistic Approaches to Languages and Cultures).

Paper short abstract:

This study comprised a comparative analysis of the English and French subtitles for Makoto Shinkai's 2016 film "Kimi no na wa." and the investigation of the types of domestication that occur in both in order to clarify aspects of intercultural communication.

Paper long abstract:

Subtitle translation is paramount to the global expansion of Japanese anime. It functions as a mediator to overcome the barriers of language and culture, communicating the appeal of Japanese anime to the world. In this context, it is essential to answer the question: what type of reconciliation between language and culture occurs in the process of translating the source text into the target text during subtitling? Ease of understanding for the audience is highly prioritized in subtitling. To this end, the translator adopts "domestication," which is the practice of adapting the source text to the language and culture of the target text. This study comprised a comparative analysis of the English and French subtitles for Makoto Shinkai's 2016 film "Kimi no na wa." and the investigation of the types of domestication that occur in both in order to clarify aspects of intercultural communication.

Data for analysis included the Japanese dialogue and the English subtitles on the Japanese DVD release (Toho 2017), and the French subtitles on the French DVD release (@ANIME 2017). The study compared and analyzed the Japanese dialogue, English subtitles, and French subtitles, as well as checked them against the video.

The results of the analysis showed that domestication happened (1) at the linguistic level, as in the explicit statement of the sentence subjects; (2) at the pragmatic level, as in greetings, idiomatic expressions, self and address terms, and utterance intentions; and (3) at the cultural level, as in social norms and traditional products. In addition, some lines of dialogue were domesticated in both English and French, while others were domesticated in only one of the two languages. In cases where both languages featured domestication, the two translated texts sometimes had the same meaning and other times had completely different meanings. In other words, reconciliation between language and culture took different forms depending on the target language. The comparative analysis of multiple different subtitle texts is an act of reconfirmation of intercultural communication. We conducted this activity as part of our coursework and found that it cultivated students' plurilingual and pluricultural awareness.