Public lecture series in EARL: Dr Kristine Hmeljak Sangawa's lecture titled "Kanbun kundoku - translating or reading? A less typical form of translation in Japanese tradition"

Centenary of the University of Ljubljana : EARL's series of public lectures

Tenth lecture:

8th January 2020 at 17:00 in lecture room 08 (EARL, FDV).

Dr Kristina Hmeljak Sangawa

Kanbun kundoku - translating or reading? A less typical form of translation in Japanese tradition

The concept of “translation” in Western translation studies discourse is generally tied to the translation practices of Western linguistic communities, and thus limited by the norms and expressive possibilities of these languages and their writing systems. The first idea that comes to mind when we talk about “translation” is probably the transformation of a written text in one language into a written text in another, with both having as much as possible the same content and a similar form. The Japanese literary tradition includes such prototypical forms of translation, but also another, less familiar form: kanbun kundoku or “descriptive reading of Chinese texts”, in which the reader reads and simultaneously translates a text written in classical Chinese into a particular style of Japanese, in an oral or mental rendition. A complex system of annotation has been developed to help readers in this endeavour, to allow them direct access to classical Chinese texts, but also for Japanese speakers to write texts in classical Chinese with the intent of having them read in (i.e. simultaneously translated into) Japanese. 

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