This paper explores how verbal ironies in English movies are translated in Japanese subtitles. Verbal ironies can be separated into two basic groups based on their interpersonal function: aggressive or friendly. Examination of Japanese subtitles of eighteen American movies showed both types of irony were most often translated as ironies preserving both their interpersonal function and the speaker’s true feelings. Aggressive ironies, however, were also often translated as non-ironies either explicating or implicating the speaker’s true feelings. On the other hand, friendly ironies were often translated as non-ironies neither explicating nor implicating thespeaker’s true feelings, only retaining their interpersonal function. Both types of irony were sometimes omitted when their implicated meaning or intended effect was communicated otherwise in a linguistic and/or non-linguistic context. The results suggest that retention of the interpersonal function takes priority over retention of the implicated meaning or the use of irony in Japanese subtitle translation.

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Subtitle translation often involving a limitation of time and space for the target rendition is called “constrained translation” where character count (i.e. the number of words) permitted in a segment is restricted. This is also known as a “6 second rule” (or 12 characters per second) in the case of English subtitle. Japanese subtitling is also confined with a similar rule that allows up to only four Japanese characters per second of utterance. These restrictions are necessary for ease of understanding or readability of subtitles; however, this over 85-year-old rule of Japanese character-restriction has never been tested scientifically as to its validity. Thus, the authors have carried out an experiment to examine the validity of the four-character-per-second rule by investigating the audiences’ reception of subtitles with the use of an eye-tracker. The result shows that up to 6 characters per second is accepted without distracting spectators’ focus and comfort.

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We republished the revised pdf file of this article as erratum because of Table 3 misprinted in page 42.

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Machine translation (MT) systems are not able to always produce translations of sufficient quality. As a practical means of utilizing such MT systems, we investigated the potential of pre-editing strategy, i.e., rewriting source texts into more machine translatable ones. We first formalized a human-in-the-loop protocol, in which human editors incrementally rewrite source sentences aiming at better MT results. Implementing this protocol with a Japanese-to-English MT system, we then collected a total of 12687 pre-edit instances for 400 source sentences on four different datasets and obtained promising results; more than 85% of source sentences turned out to be accurately translated by the MT system. We also revealed that the pre-edited Japanese source sentences were better translated into Chinese and Korean, confirming the usefulness of pre-editing strategy in amultilingual translation setting. Through analyzing the collected pre-edit instances, we built a typology of edit operations comprising 53 types, which unveils the subjects for further research.

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Xia Mianzun compiled Akutagawa Ryunosuke’s “The journey to China” with the title of “Akutagawa Ryunosuke’s China outlook” in “The short story magazine” published in April 1926. In this paper we examine Xia Mianzun’s translation with the aim of studying Akutagawa Ryunosuke’s view of China. We refer specifically to related historical materials of the same period in order to analyze from multiple perspectives the contents of Akutagawa’s travel journal and his implied opinions. Furthermore, we interpret the journal as important data to gain a deeper understanding of the author and the translator, and of the society of the time.

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MNH-TT, a collaborative translation training platform, includes a menu of “revision categories” that provides an error typology designed specifically for scaffolding translator competence (Toyoshima, et al, 2016; Yamamoto, et al., 2016). Toyoshima et al. (ibid), who analyzed the trends and improvement in error typology with respect to students’ learning level, found a certain error, X3 (content-distortion), constantly the highest in error count. In order to investigate the detailed causes of X3, the authors of the present paper carried out an experiment with five college learners which examined their translation process using screen recording and retrospection interviews. The results show that the root causes of X3 can be subcategorized into two kinds: one in which the translator was unaware of making such errors, and the other where the translator was aware that s/he was facing difficulties but failed to fully grasp the source meaning. The second category can be divided further to include translators who understood the content and aimed at elaborating the target renditions further but without success.

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The main purpose of this paper is to report on a 2017 interpretation workshop. In the workshop, students received peer and instructor feedback on their performance, listened to the recordings of their work and realized what they needed to improve by themselves. In addition, since a session for students to interpret a guest speaker’s presentation where students went through a similar experience as that of a professional interpreter was included in the latter half of the course, students worked hard with a sense of purpose from the beginning. Due to both the established learning cycle and the sense of purpose, students demonstrated remarkable progress exceeding the college class framework.

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This paper reports the utilization of smartphones and its effect in a consecutive interpreting class held in the Fall semester of 2016 at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies. Following a request in the previous term-end questionnaire from a student hoping to find good self-learning materials and given that every student owns a smartphone, I introduced smartphones into classroom activities as well their use as a self-learning tool. I review the benefit of utilizing smartphones in general classes through a comparison with Computer Assisted Language Learning classes and also examine – principally by means of a term-end questionnaire – how students perceive the use of smartphone in class and as a self-learning tool. I propose this utilization of smartphones as a possible interpreting pedagogy while referring to some challenges to consider for the future.

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The HTS Japanese Translation Project, funded by the Japan Association for Interpreting and Translation Studies (2014-2017), organized the translation of 36 articles from the Handbook of Translation Studies for publication in the Handbook’s online version. In the present report, six participants reflect on the translation and revision process adopted for the project. The case studies show how exchanges between the translator and two revisers prompted the translators to rethink their understanding of concepts, textual organization, and fluency norms, among other matters, thus not only producing better translations but also adding to their comprehension of conceptual issues in their research fields.

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