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This paper presents a study on the translation of slang used by drag queens. The study aims to examine how the slang used by drag queens in RuPaul’s Drag Race season 12 is translated into Japanese. The translation strategies used are revealed and the faithfulness of the translation is discussed. Both the original and translated expressions, jargon and words used by drag queens in RuPaul’s Drag Race season 12 were gathered from the first three episodes. The data was then grouped based on the translation strategy and discussed further regarding the effectiveness of the translation strategy and faithfulness of the translation itself with the help of Nida’s theory of dynamic equivalence. The results show that translation by loan, excluding the omission, was the most used translation strategy, but its success hinges on the familiarity of the target audience. Together with substitution, they were the most successful strategies regarding the faithfulness of the translation and the preservation of the slang. Softening, employed to adapt informal and vulgar expressions, risked losing the original slang, and modulation also less successful in preserving it. Paraphrase and explicitation were less successful in retaining the slang nuances but aligned with Nida’s dynamic equivalence which emphasizes the meaning.

This thesis represents a partial translation of the short story collection Omedetō by Kawakami Hiromi. Published in 2000, the collection contains twelve short stories, each narrating an intimate relationship between two people. It was favorably received by the literary world and was republished twice, in 2003 and 2007. My critical introduction provides context to Omedetō by discussing Kawakami’s biography and writing style, and the book’s reception in Japan. I also make note of my translation methods, domestication and dynamic equivalence, and provide examples of how I translated onomatopoeia. Finally, I give historical background to Japanese intimacy at the turn of the millennium and argue that each story serves as a commentary on Japanese modern intimacy, which Kawakami defines as a combination of physical and emotional closeness or a yearning for such.

The Inferno from La Commedia, by Dante Alighieri has been translated into Japanese about a dozen times in the past 110 years. In this comparative analysis, seven of those are analysed and compared with regards to how cultural terms were translated and to what degree the different translators tried to make a word-by word translation for certain selected passages. Nine such passages, with a total of 93 lines were chosen. About 60 words were analysed per translator and the main goal was to determine whether if they have a tendency towards foreignisation or domestication. A Natural Language Processing analysis was also conducted to assess the similarity of translations in terms of word usage. Besides the oldest translation, which is quite different when it comes to both word usage and grammar and is therefore considered an outlier, two main groups emerge. One that tends to translate more word-by-word than the other, which is freer. All in the first group imitate the Italian pronunciation of cultural terms using katakana, while most in the latter prefer the current Japanese term. In between these groups appears one translator, which is more consequently following the change of words in a similar way like Dante did when referring to Virgilio, while others tend to use the same word several times.

The notion that consistency is important when translating technical terms is nothing new in itself. Despite this, it is not uncommon to see the very same technical terms being translated into a multitude of words, even when various efforts to unify the process have been proposed. This diversity in the translation of technical terms has previously been shown to occur in the medical field by analyzing equipment manuals. However, there is a lack of research on how technical term translation fares in other fields. To narrow this identified gap, quantitative overviews of the translations from the widely respected operating system Debian are presented. The first overview is a list of the 354 most frequently appearing English technical terms. This was created by looking at the existing textual data of the system quantitatively, together with a judgment-based term selection process with the help of domain experts. The second overview is an analysis of how the 10 most frequently used identified technical terms are translated into Japanese. This is done by Catford’s probabilistic notion of textual equivalence, which shows the different translation alternatives found in the data and the probability of their appearance. The results of this study indicate that there is a varying degree of unification within the translation of technical terms. The synthesized data of the study can be used by the translation community to deepen educated decisions on the translation of technical terms within the field of information technology.