F u z a i : Culture, Contracts & Cloud Cats In The Japanese Translation Of Kenneth Oppel’s Airborn

In my thesis, I examine the many processes of societal, cultural and linguistic negotiation within Masaru Harada's Japanese translation of Canadian author Kenneth Oppel's 2004 young adult novel, Airborn. By approaching the notion of translation as a theoretical framework, I explore both the source text and its translation across the metatextual, textual and editorial levels, exam­ining the tensions, commentary, and unspoken narratives on audience, culture, and the novel it­ self that arise from the translation process. Tracing the implications of the translation's phonetic gloss and interventional explanations, I first interrogate both the translation's assumptions about its readership, and the narrative behind the translation's integration of made-up terminology and "politeness levels" exclusive to the Japanese language into the text. I continue with an examina­tion of the parallels between the textualization processes present in the novel's plot and the trans­lation process, discussing the various ways in which the text itself mirrors, and even comments on issues of translation via its own narrative. Finally, I explore the narrative of expectations and assumptions surrounding the text itself with regard to Harada's own commentary about the novel's translation, editorial interventions, and the translation's ultimate commercial reception within Japan. In doing so, I foreground the multilayered nature of translation itself, and further illumi­nate the ways in which societal, cultural, and linguistic differences are ultimately handled and negotiated within the novel's translation.