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Deutsches Institut für Japanstudien
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April 9, 2024

Journal article by Nicole M. Mueller examines historical change in Japanese translation strategies

© Nicole Marion Mueller

What happens if the same literary source text is translated again and again into the same target language? In her PhD research, Nicole M. Mueller set out to answer this question by conducting a digitally augmented analysis of the 15 Japanese (re)translations of Thomas Mann’s novel Tonio Kröger – a seminal text for the elitist kyōyōshugi movement that had a lasting influence on Japanese humanities and on scholarly translation culture. By implementing digital Topic Modeling as a means of operationalizing similarity scores between literary (re)translations, Nicole retraces previously hidden patterns of influence and similarity between different takes on the same source text. This reveals connections between varying historical factors and translation priorities such as faithfulness towards the source text or a natural expression in the Japanese target language. The article (in Japanese) summarizes key findings from Nicole’s PhD project and is published open access in Keiō University’s bulletin Nihongo to Nihongo kyōiku.