Document Type

Senior Thesis

Publication Date

Spring 2025

Abstract

Role language, a term coined for the different kinds of speech employed by fictional characters according to their archetypes, is notoriously difficult to translate from Japanese into English. There is no direct way to express in English the sentence-ending particles, variations in verb conjugation, and differing first-person pronouns associated with role language, but translators can often work around these issues through effective word choice. In manga, translators are further helped by the aid of the medium’s visuals, which can contribute to the reader’s understanding of a character’s archetype. However, what happens when a character’s role language does not match up with their visual appearance? This paper studies the manga “Princess Jellyfish” and one of its main characters, Koibuchi Kuranosuke, a crossdressing man who switches between two types of role language - Male Language and Burikko, a subcategory of Female Language. Just as Kuranosuke flits between a feminine and masculine gender performance, he utilizes both of these kinds of role language, often in ways that don’t correspond with his visual performance. I analyze how translators are able to capture this dissonance in performance in a language, like English, that cannot directly reconstruct the linguistic aspects of role language, highlighting the difficulties in translating first-person pronouns and queer subtext while underlying the importance of creativity in the translation field.

Comments

Capstone paper for Japanese 498, supervised by Dr. Michael Wood.

Copyright

The author

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License

Download

Share

COinS