Returning Loanwords : Translation of Western Loanwords in Japanese to English

Abstract: Although the similarities between the English language and the Japanese language are few, the two have influenced each other profoundly in the last century. The category of words called gairaigo in the Japanese language mostly consist of loanwords from Western languages – in particular English. But what happens when translators translate these originally English words in Japanese back to English? This thesis sought to examine what kind of local strategies Japanese-to-English translators use when translating gairaigo, if these strategies vary depending on the text type and whether or not there is a correlation between the local strategies and the word class of the gairaigo. Three different kinds of texts were examined; a novel, several newspaper articles and an operation manual. By comparing the source texts with their corresponding target texts, it was possible to determine six different local strategies used to translate gairaigo – omission, returning, transposition, modulation, equivalence and paraphrase.