| Abstract: | Abstract:This study of contemporary Japanese translations of selected stories of Edgar Allen Poe argues that contemporary translators have adopted a creative strategy of translation that succeeds in avoiding what Berman has called ‘the destruction of underlying networks of signification’. In a writer of gothic horror such as Poe, chains of expression that establish a mood and visualization are vital to building the reader’s sense of fear and anticipation. The current study shows that the Japanese translators employ sound symbolism and alliteration to create a feeling akin to that in Poe, yet their application of such techniques is distributed differently than in Poe’s original language, and differently from one another. This article examines the use of mimetics in four contemporary Japanese translations of two of Poe’s gothic horror narratives and two translations of one detective narrative. The results show that the Japanese translators used mimetic words in their translations at rates similar to those found in recent studies of selected writers of modern and contemporary fiction. The second finding is that when translating the passages containing the seventy-six sound-symbolic forms in the English source text, the translators of Poe used Japanese mimetic terms 34 per cent of the time. The third finding is that the 34 per cent figure for percentage of sound-symbolic English words translated with mimetic expressions in the target text represented only 12 percent of the total number of mimetics (355 tokens) used in the Japanese translations. The fourth finding reveals an overlap in translator use of a mimetic averaging 42.6 per cent. |
