This research focuses on the of translation of Japanese military terminology and imagery into English and Russian throughout the XX century using Heike Monogatari as an example of Japanese medieval war tales. Military terminology and imagery have a network of embedded meanings and inter-linguistic references that the translators attempt to match to convey the meaning on the macro-level of the text. However, as this layer of lexis is rich with Extralinguistic Cultural References – i.e. the words that have no exact equivalent across the linguistic pair – in the choices different translators make while rendering the text into English and Russian we can see the influence of the academic field of Asian studies and to indirectly assess the predispositions and translational norms in academia at a time. To provide an extension of the research and to emphasize the role of the translator in the process of meaning-making across two language pairs, a major part of the thesis outlines the historiography of Heike translation and the biography of a translator where possible.
At their inception Japanese-English translations of Japanese war tales with Heike as a case study were carried out by British scholars and translators. With figures of intercultural communicators from diplomat A.B. Mitford to historian A. L. Sadler, the issue of class coinciding and partially overlapping with the aesthetical and political movement of medievalism prompted the translators to curate their selection of materials for publication in accordance with their class-attuned taste. This led to a degree of tampering with the original, which was tolerated by the target culture to a high degree.
After WWII, the U.S. Asian studies scholarship fostered by military forces (E. Seidensticker, D. Keene, H., and W. McCullough among others) stepped into the avant-garde of the Japanese-English translations. As the military training of the interpreters allowed more social mobility, the class profile of the interpreters was increasingly varied. The question of class consciousness is shunned, and a question of marginality and positionality of Japanese culture and literature in the world literary system becomes prominent in the second half of the XX century.
In the Soviet Union, ideology and overt political orientation of academia manifested in the interpretation of the Japanese medieval literature within the context of the power struggle between the classes, and an anti-cosmopolitanism were manifested on a word level to a high degree. From the viewpoint of a Soviet Japanese studies scholar, academia was often described as a place of refuge from the indoctrination of Soviet propaganda, and medieval texts were used as means of indirect social commentary and channeling of the traumatic experiences that Soviet scholars endured.
Comparative analysis of the texts across multiple retranslations further proves and reinforces the arguments outlined in the biographic sections of the thesis.