Eine gewisse Farbe der Fremdheit - Aspekte des Übersetzens Japanisch-Deutsch-Japanisch (A Certain Shade of Otherness - Aspects of Japanese-German-Japanese Translation)

Any contact or exchange among cultures and societies is based on translation. This very fact, however, is of such fundamental nature that we are hardly aware of how deeply our perception of the world is formed by translations. This volume is the first to address these basic facts in Japanese-German exchanges systematically, and it does so over a broad range of issues.

Economic and institutional conditions are investigated in contributions dealing with the market from the perspectives of the editing department, the publisher, and the newspaper feuilleton. The social and historical dimensions of translation are highlighted in articles dealing with translations from German into Japanese, including image and marketing problems, and the role of translation for German Studies in Japan which traditionally have been identified to a large degree with translation. A quantitative comparison of book licensing and sales as well as translations in both directions makes possible for the first time a well-grounded analysis of the intellectual presence of translations in the each country. Other contributions deal with the translation of poetry and machine translation. Also, a Japanese and a German writer address the relationship between translation and creative writing.