Proceso de mantenimiento del equipo motriz

In the context of TS, the problems discussed in this paper point in two directions.

On the one hand, this concerns the globalization of the canon—if we are willing to accept a notion of “canon” in the twenty-fi rst century at all. Generally speaking, we have been observing the abdication of the Western canon for some time now, but the trade imbalances of the twentieth century and earlier still seem largely intact. Much of this has to do with the hegemony of English in international communication, but in this paper I have tried to show that the reasons are more complex and can also be found in intransigent attitudes on the part of some Japanese authors. Pretranslation, which I have singled out as a strategy on the part of certain Japanese writers, serves as a focal point for discussing some of the diffi cult options and unclarifi ed dependencies in the international traffi c of literature. It goes without saying that this strategy is not “unique” or particularly common with Japanese writers but can be observed with writers of other languages as well, as demonstrated in this paper.

Emily Apter is one of the major players in recent TS who have taken up the dispute over world poetry and the anxiety of global infl uence (see Owen 1990) to meditate on the options of a so-called Th ird World Literature (in this case from Algeria) in the world literary market—that is, the choice between what she calls “the dangers of becoming translatable” (Apter 2006 : 108) and remaining ignored. Much of what she discusses in the context of the dispute about the popularity of the Chinese writer Bei Dao’s translated poetry, which has been accused of “cozy ethnicity” and of catering to an “implicit nostalgia for China’s traditional heritage” and a “deeply ingrained Orientalism” on the receiving side (Apter 2006 : 101), echoes the discussion of the Japanese examples presented above. Th ere is no easy solution in sight for the problem of what Apter calls

“being blacked-out or whited-over in the international public sphere of letters”

(Apter 2006 : 108).

Yet it is obvious that the Japanese case is underrepresented in this discussion.

For instance, Lawrence Venuti, another major protagonist in TS, refers to current practices in his now-standard work Th e Translation Studies Reader , but he would certainly have modifi ed his statements had he considered examples

of translations from Japanese. ¹⁴ At the same time, however, Venuti alerts us to the second direction of inquiry that results from our analysis of strategies for standardizing Japanese literature—that is, the fact that there cannot be one globalized and “straightened-out” version of a Japanese text. As Venuti writes,

Th e foreign text is rewritten in domestic dialects and discourses, registers and styles, and this results in the production of textual eff ects that signify only in the history of the receiving language and culture. (Venuti 2004 : 485)

Japanese literature on a global level can therefore be realized only as an aggregate of diff erent versions in as many languages as possible, each with a life of its own.

Studying their semantic and stylistic diff erences and culture-specifi c “textual eff ects” could form another avenue to understanding the poetic potential of what has conventionally been termed the “original.” Studies like these have not only enriched the fi eld of TS, ¹⁵ they also show how this fi eld contributes to a transcending of the narrow confi nes of the study of national literatures. In an age when it is obvious that Japanese literature is part of the “international public sphere of letters,” the discipline of kokubungaku (the study of Japanese literature) will benefi t from this border-crossing through the fresh perspective that TS off ers for approaching Japanese texts. As Jonathan E. Abel has stated in regard to translations of Classical Japanese texts into modern Japanese, “Translations do share something with the translated, but this sharing is not the communicating of one text’s message to another, the erasing of one by another, the domineering of one over another, or the embellishment of one text at the expense of the other.

Th is sharing is the being-in-common, the standing-in-relation between two texts.” (Abel 2005 : 155). Th rough sophisticated application of a TS-informed approach to Japanese works and their variants in other languages, we can expect exciting new vistas for “Japanese literature” to prosper.

Notes

1 Th e series Japanische Bibliothek (Japanese Library) was published with Insel Publishers, then Frankfurt/M. and Leipzig. It features some pre-modern but mostly modern and contemporary authors.

2 See Fogel (2006). More recently, however, translations of works by this particular author have appeared in English.

3 See Schamoni (2008). Incidentally, it was this scholar of Japanese literature who excavated August Ludwig Schlözer as a precursor to Goethe, who is generally credited with the “invention” of the term ‘“world literature.”

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4 I want to thank Wolfgang Schamoni, Ōgai’s German translator, for alerting me to this text.

5 Another writer with an eye for the eff ects of being translated is Jun’ichirō Tanizaki (1886–1965), who in his 1927 essay Jōzetsuroku (“Tongue on the Loose”) acknowledged that his aim was to write a “Western” style, rather than a beautiful style, and that he was embarrassed to admit that while writing it he had constantly kept in mind whether it would be easily translatable into English. I want to thank Judy Wakabayashi for this hint. Tanizaki’s opposition of “beautiful” versus “Western”

style, by the way, refers us to another fascinating issue in this context, namely the idea that the style of translations from European languages into Japanese constitutes a so-called Th ird Literature ( dai-san no bungaku ) situated between original Japanese texts and literature in foreign languages. On the idea of Th ird Literature, as propagated by the translation scholar Ken Itō, see Hijiya-Kirschnereit (2001): 27–28.

6 Much Japanese writing aimed even at domestic audiences also has “foreign” touches as a result of over a century of contact with foreign texts.

7 I have dealt with this issue in a number of articles. See, for example, Hijiya-Kirschnereit (1994).

8 I have dealt with these aspects in a number of papers. See, for example, Hijiya-Kirschnereit (1993) and ((ed.) 2001).

9 On Mishima’s directions concerning the translation of his works, see also Donald Keene’s remarks in the panel discussion documented in Hijiya-Kirschnereit (2010).

10 By this what I mean is an ironing out of obvious contradictions on the level of the plot or other aspects awkward to Western readers who, since the days of the literature of realism, are more sensitive to violations of the laws of probability.

11 I have discussed this problem under the rubric of the Hollywoodization of Japanese literature (Hijiya-Kirschnereit (ed.) 2001). Jay Rubin, translator of Murakami’s Nejimakidori Kuronikkuru and other works, has responded to this discussion on editing in the appendix to his book Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words (2002) without, however, dealing with the problem of “Hollywoodization.”

12 “Freihandel der Begriff e und Gefühle,” in Goethe’s talks with Eckermann (1827). See Schrimpf ’s essay on Goethe’s notion of world literature, explaining Goethe’s idea of an exchange of intellectual goods on the marketplace of all nations (Schrimpf 1968 : 45–8). Goethe’s explanation about the “world market of intellectual goods” and the “free trade of notions and feelings” can be found in Goethe (1993): 157–8.

13 Th e reception of Yukio Mishima as material and literary motif in various literatures is a concrete example of what it means for Japanese literature to be part of the literatures of the world. See my essay “Sekai no bungaku to Mishima” (Yukio Mishima in the literatures of the world) in Hijiya-Kirschnereit (ed.) (2010).

14 One thinks of his observation that “Dates, historical and geographical markers, the characters’ names—even when the names are rather complicated and foreign-sounding—these are generally not altered or only in rare cases (e.g. Russian names).” (Venuti 2004 : 484). Translations from Japanese literary works seem to ignore these rules much more frequently than Venuti might imagine.

15 An example is the study Anders Gesagt/Autrement Dit/In Other Words (Utz 2007), which compares various English and French versions of German-language works by Hoff mann, Fontane, Kafk a, and Musil.

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Overview

Behind the growth of today’s game industry as a major global digital entertainment sector lies the signifi cant role played by Japanese game companies such as Nintendo, Sega, and Sony Computer Entertainment (hereaft er abbreviated as Sony) since the early days of the industry’s development. Industry insiders generally agree that without Japanese contributions the game sector would not have gone beyond “a passing fad” (Aoyama and Izushi 2003 : 424). Commenting on the power shift in the video game industry from the United States to Japan, Consalvo (2006: 132) cautiously remarks that the fl ow of cultural dominance for consoles and many major games is currently in the direction from East to West, “with Japan leading production, the USA and Europe following.” Taking into consideration the longstanding association of video games with Japan, this chapter explores the relatively new translation research domain known as game localization, with the aim of exploring a potential direction for Translation Studies (TS) that is currently under development in Japan.

Video games originated in the late 1950s in the United States, which dominated the market until the so-called Atari crash saw the fall of the United States game industry in the early 1980s (Kent 2001 ). At the same time Japanese arcade games such as Space Invaders (Taito, 1978) and Pac-Man (Namco, 1980) enjoyed early international successes. In the game console era—starting with the 1983 release of Nintendo Famicom in Japan, known as Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) elsewhere, subsequently followed by Sega Saturn and Sony PlayStation, both in 1994—Japan’s dominance in the international arena became apparent, both as a major hardware manufacturer (platform holder) and as a

Transcreating Japanese Video Games:

Exploring a Future Direction for