Why is the Japanese writing style wack? (It isn't)

Having learnt to be skeptical about what I read, I approached Lynne Riggs’s The Translation of Essays and Journalistic Prose with care. It then disturbed me that Riggs blames the homogeneity of Japanese readership for the difficulty of translating Japanese essays. In another blog post, I doubted the claim that English readers prefer clarity in academic texts while Japanese readers prefer euphemism. Do we have to go over this issue again? I continued reading with my bias.

 

Through my biased lens, I think Riggs is asserting cultural superiority in justifying her approach to translating Japanese essays. She gives me an impression that Japanese writing styles are unsophisticated, and that translation into English must involve obliterating the original text and providing better alternatives to salvage the message. She references that the heterogeneous community of anglophone readers expects inspiring essay titles and well-crafted lead paragraph, but why should we assume that we need to improve on the original for our translation to look appealing to international readers?

 

I then had to disagree with myself after reading Charles Terry’s A Live Dog: Some Pointers on Translation. Terry argues that a “word for word” translation philosophy would not work for us, because English speakers and Japanese speakers would say very different things in similar circumstances. To respond to my own question: translating Japanese essays without changing the writing style is a bad idea, because they are too different from what the English readers are used to.

 

My previous suspicion was far-fetched. The reality may simply be that the English academic community has its own expectations of what a good essay should look like. My new conclusion is that translators have to redo “unnecessary” stylistic choices in Japanese writings only because the English community adopts a different set of expectations.

 

-Marcus