Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the often-conflicting relationship between newsworthiness and translatability by analyzing how Japanese newspaper articles quoted President Trump and President Obama through comparison of their original speeches and the news texts published in their first 100 days in office.

Paper long abstract:

According to journalist-turned-sociolinguist Allan Bell, "News is what people say more than what people do," and much of what journalists report is "talk not action" (Bell 1991: 53). This statement holds true in the case of Japanese newspapers, which are filled with quotations, including utterances that have been translated into Japanese.

While news media in some countries prefer to use indirect speech, Japanese media prefer direct quotation, in which utterances are generally reproduced as faithfully as possible (Matsushita 2019). However, this standard proves flexible when translation is involved, leading to unique findings such as textual manipulations (e.g. omissions, additions, substitutions, etc.) at levels rarely seen in monolingual quoting (ibid.).

The emergence of Donald Trump as an exceptionally newsworthy U.S. president has posed an even larger challenge to news translators in Japan because of his unexpected and hard-to-translate remarks. Japanese newspapers often write stories about President Trump's off-the-cuff remarks and seemingly random tweets but nearly as often fail to achieve linguistic and cultural equivalence because his utterances are difficult if not impossible to translate into any other language (Lichfield 2016), let alone one as linguistically distant as Japanese (Osaki 2017).

This paper illustrates how untranslatability can prevent a newsworthy utterance from being directly quoted (e.g. changed to indirect quotes or reproduced less faithfully) by comparing how Japanese journalists have quoted President Trump and his predecessor, President Obama. Through comparison of original speeches (source texts) and 808 articles published in Japanese newspapers (target texts), it shows how institutional conventions of Japanese newspaper companies regarding direct quotations are strategically ignored when quoting President Trump, leading to marked differences in the portrayal of the two presidents.

References

Bell, Allan. 1991. The Language of News Media. Oxford: Blackwell.

Lichfield, Gideon. 2016. "Inside the nearly impossible quest to translate 'Make America Great Again' into Spanish." QUARTZ, November 26, 2016.

Matsushita, Kayo. 2019. When News Travels East: Translation Practices by Japanese Newspapers. Leuven University Press.

Osaki, Tomohiro. 2017. "Japan's interpreters struggle to make sense of 'Trumpese.'" The Japan Times, February 17, 2017.

Paper short abstract:

This presentation discussed why movement and political interest are hidden in youth culture after the 1970s even though students had involved in the radical insurgency in the late 1960s from magazines published after the 1970s edited by retired activists who had involved in student movements.

Paper long abstract:

My study investigates how Japanese youth lost their political and counter identity after the late 1970s. Previous researches of youth studies and social movements showed their interest in youth culture and movements after the 1970s. Youth studies argued that young generation who called as apathic (shirake) or no movement (mukyoto) generation lost their interest in political issue because they became able to enjoy their modern lifestyle on consumer society after the late 1970s. On the other hand, social movement studies mentioned that youth engaged new social movements by lifestyle level after the 1970s.

This presentation discussed why movements and political interests are hidden after the 1970s even though students had involved in the radical insurgency in the late 1960s. The author focused on the magazines for youth created by retired activists who had involved in student movements like Zenkyoto and Shinsayoku activisms. In the magazines, retired activists played the role as leaders of youth culture after the 1970s and they tried to socialize the next generation. The study tried to investigate how ex-protesters inherit their political experience to the younger readers. The author collected document data of magazines published after the 1970s: They are "Bikkuri House" and "Takarajima", and interview data of participants who contributed the magazines. From the data, we considered that youth gradually lost their political and counter identity in the communicational process between editors and readers on the magazine because editors who had joined 1960s student movements socialized young readers as "depoliticized youth". We could find that the contents which sneered and ridiculed activists and feminists in both the contributed articles and editors' comments in the magazines. Moreover, we could find that there was similar tendency among other medias represented 1970s sub-culture (e.g. radio and television contents) from the interview data.

From the findings, we can discuss that barriers to political participation was culturally constructed after the 1970s because people consider political participation as selfish, trouble making, meaningless, and disrespectful: such antipathy for social movements and political participations was passed on from retired activists generation to the next generation via subculture (sabukaru) after the 1970s.