University of Heidelberg

Researcher: Dr. Noriyo Hoozawa-Arkenau 

In this subproject translations from Russian into Japanese and that from Japanese into Russian during the Meiji-epoch, at the end of the 19th century in Japan, are researched. In the project the so called gembun-itchi-movement at that time is considered as a dissolution process of diglossia. The gembun-itchi-movement is a language reform in that the previous written language was abandoned, which has been so different from the really spoken language that one should consider the written language to be another language system. Such a language situation is called by the sociolinguist Charles Ferguson ‘diglossia’, in which the written and spoken linguistic variants are called H and L respectively (I will, however, use the term “Not-H” instead of “L”). In the dissolution of the diglossia in Japan translations from the western languages, especially Russian, played an important role.  

 In the process of transfer/translation between Japanese and foreign languages some asymmetrical relationships are to be observed: First, Russian language, which has played a very important role in and for the dissolution of diglossia, and which exerted enormous influences on the Japanese literature, was not the most translated language  -  from English, e.g., much more works were translated. Second, while Russian of the original texts was a homogenous language system, the Japanese language at that time still consisted of two subsystems. In translations from Russian the process was clearly to be seen in that those two competing subsystems were merged to one unified system.  And third, incomparably fewer translations from Japanese into Russian were done than from Russian into Japanese. Furthermore, the process of the translations, in which the structural change of the linguistic systems of the Japanese language at that time was clearly mirrored, was little or scarcely researched, albeit the weight of the translation’s texts in itself was emphasized repeatedly.

There have been language contacts (not only in the form of translations) between Russian and Japanese already before the gembun-itchi-epoch. After the Meiji-epoch (1868-1912) there were also cultural and linguistic contacts not only between Russian and Japanese or between Japanese on the one hand and Chinese, Korean and/or even the Manchurian Language on the other, but also between Japanese, Korean and Chinese on the one hand and the western languages on the other. Those fields, which had been relatively little researched, will be also considered.