Return to search

The Japanese Translation of the Book of Mormon: A Study in the Theory and Practice of Translation

English and Japanese are very different from each other in tems of their structures. And consequently no one would call the present translation of the Japanese Book of Mormon a low rank-bound translation. However, a substantial amount of grammatical categories of English such as number, redundant subject for Japanese, pronominal expression, and the passive voice which is not used so often in Japanese as in English, are introduced in the translation. The improper placement of subject, verb and object also serves as a cause of foreign tones. Thus the present translation has more factors of Formal-Equivalence translation than those of Dynamic-Equivalence translation. The principle of 'accuracy and fidelity' resulted in an unnatrual translation to some extent, imposing an effort of understanding the text on the shoulders of the readers. It was also found out that a lack of knowledge of Hebraism resulted in 'betrayal by ignorance,' creating many unnatural Japanese expressions as well as a certain number of mistranslations.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:BGMYU2/oai:scholarsarchive.byu.edu:etd-5986
Date01 January 1976
CreatorsNumano, Jiro
PublisherBYU ScholarsArchive
Source SetsBrigham Young University
Detected LanguageEnglish
Typetext
Formatapplication/pdf
SourceTheses and Dissertations
Rightshttp://lib.byu.edu/about/copyright/

Page generated in 0.0012 seconds