Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

If the translation we are discussing is complete, we might call it a zen’yaku or a kan’yaku … A first translation is a shoyaku. A retranslation is a kaiyaku, and the new translation is a shin’yaku that replaces the old translation, or kyūyaku. A translation of a translation is a jūyaku. A standard translation that seems unlikely to be replaced is a teiyaku; equally unlikely to be replaced is a mei-yaku, or “celebrated translation.” When a celebrated translator speaks of her own work, she may disparage it as setsuyaku, “clumsy translation,” i.e., “my own translation,” which is not to be confused with a genuinely bad translation, disparaged as a dayaku or an akuyaku. A co-translation is a kyōyaku or gōyaku; a draft translation, or shitayaku, may be polished through a process of “supervising translation” or kan’yaku, without it becoming a kyōyaku or gōyaku. Translations are given different names depending on the approach they take to the original: they can be chokuyaku (literally, “direct translation”), chikugoyaku (“word-for-word translation”), iyaku (“sense translation”), taiyaku (“translation presented with the original text on facing pages”), or, in the case of translations of works by Sidney Sheldon, Danielle Steel, John Grisham, and other popular American writers, chōyaku (“translations that are even better than the originals,” an invention and registered trademark of the Academy Press).[12]

English possesses a wide range of names for different kinds of flowers: one way of referring to the relationship between, say, tulip and flower is to call flower a hypernym and tulip, along with rose, hydrangea, camellia, and so on, the hyponyms of the term flower. Hypernym and hyponym refer to relationships between words in a language, not to (botanical or other) relations between the things they refer to. So we could say that Japanese lacks a hypernym for all its various translation terms, whereas English has the hypernym but no readily available set of hyponyms. But the very structure of such an argument takes us into dangerous territory. It sets up English as the “Standard” or the “Thinking Language” because it alone has the general term, and could easily accommodate new coinages to give the meanings of the Japanese terms—uptranslate, downtranslate, newtranslate, retranslate, cotranslate, and so on. But it is not so obvious how we could translate the general or abstract notion of translation into Japanese, and so we would be predisposed to thinking of that language as deficient in precisely the respect in which it is richer than English.