Knowledge Bank

Japanese translators construct gender by assigning different speech styles to the speech of non-Japanese characters. Their usages of speech styles show three tendencies. First, the speech of non-Japanese white women is often translated into stereotypical Japanese women’s language. Such translations serve to naturalize the reserved, polite femininity associated with Japanese women’s language as if it is shared by women all over the world. Second, the speech of non-Japanese casual men is translated into a peculiar informal style used only by non-Japanese men. Such translations, by dividing Japanese and non-Japanese masculinities, work to sustain the hegemonic status of the polite Japanese masculinity. Third, the combination of women’s language features with plain sentence-final forms is utilized to the speech of women in Europe, North America and South America more frequently than that of women in Asia and Africa. In contrast, the speech of women in Asia and Africa is often translated with the honorific sentence-final forms. Such translations reproduce and reinforce the Japanese stereotypes of women in the former regions as informal and those in the latter regions as polite.