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Paper short abstract

This paper examines ethical challenges in translating Japanese fantastic literature into Romanian. Using Osamu Dazai’s short stories “Seihintan” and “Chikusei”, it explores how translation functions as cultural mediation across asymmetrical literary and cultural systems.

Paper long abstract

Keywords: translation ethics, Japanese fantastic literature, cultural mediation, Japanese-Romanian translation

Translation is not a neutral transfer of meaning between languages, but an ethically charged practice shaped by interpretive choices and asymmetrical power relations. Translation ethics addresses the responsibility of translators towards source texts, their socio-cultural frameworks, and target audiences, particularly when literary works circulate beyond their original contexts. Rather than prescribing universal norms, contemporary approaches increasingly understand translation ethics as emerging from situated practices and concrete decision-making.

This paper examines ethical challenges in translating Japanese fantastic literature into Romanian, focusing on Osamu Dazai’s short stories ”Seihintan” and “Chikusei”. These texts rework East Asian folklore through a modern Japanese literary sensibility. Fantastic narratives provide a particularly productive site for this analysis, as their reliance on ambiguity and culturally specific imaginaries intensifies the ethical stakes of translation. Such features resist domestication within European literary systems, raising questions about how alterity can be mediated without being neutralised.

The Romanian context offers a particularly revealing case study because translations are produced directly from Japanese, without mediation through dominant pivot languages such as English or French. This direct translation trajectory foregrounds ethical and interpretive decisions that are often obscured in globally circulating translations shaped by Anglophone literary norms. As a semi-peripheral European language, Romanian makes visible the asymmetries involved in cross-cultural literary circulation. Translating the Japanese fantastic into Romanian thus highlights how genre expectations, cultural references, and narrative opacity are negotiated in the absence of a standardised global template.

By analysing specific translation strategies, including the handling of folklore-derived imagery, ambiguity, and stylistic estrangement, the paper conceptualises translation as cultural mediation rather than equivalence-seeking transfer. Situated within a trans-regional framework, the study traces the movement of texts from Chinese folklore to Japanese modern literature and into a European cultural space.

The paper argues that examining translation from a peripheral, non-pivot linguistic context has broader implications for Japanese studies, translation studies, and world literature. It demonstrates that ethical translation practices shape not only textual outcomes but also the conditions under which Japanese literature becomes legible beyond its original context, challenging centre-periphery models of literary circulation.