Paula Martínez-Sirés,

The purpose of this mixed research is, on the one hand, to study the typology of the translator’s footnotes found in the translations from Japanese into Spanish of Higuchi Ichiyō’s Takekurabe, and, on the other hand, to quantitatively investigate the suitability and acceptability of said notes amongst target readers with a questionnaire. The analysis shows that the respondents had a high degree of acceptability towards translator’s notes, independently on whether they were frequent or non-frequent readers of Japanese literature. It was also observed that metalinguistic and ethnographic notes were considered the most necessary ones by readers. Hence, the results of this study provide objective data that can be used by publishers and translators alike on the adequacy of translator’s footnotes in Japanese literary translations.

This paper will examine Wasuregatami (‘The Memento,’ 1890), Wakamatsu Shizuko’s Japanese translation of Adelaide Anne Procter’s poem The Sailor Boy (1858). The poem is narrativized into the Japanese monogatari style and the culturemes are assimilated into the target-culture context of Japan in an apparent domesticating approach. Nevertheless, Wakamatsu Shizuko’s inclusion in the translation of original source-culture items and the implementation of the experimental colloquial genbun itchi (vernacular) literary style, could also exemplify Venuti’s foreignizing and “defamiliarizing” translation since it goes “beyond literalism to advocate an experimentalism” by using “registers, and styles already available in the translating language to create a discursive heterogeneity” (Venuti 2000: 341). This paper will contend that the style used in Wasuregatami was the cornerstone on which Shizuko would base her later, more acclaimed translations of children’s literature into Japanese.