What motivates a Japanese translator and theatre company to translate and perform a play about racial discrimination in the American South? What happens to a 'gay' play when it is staged in a country where the performance of gender is a theatrical tradition? What are the politics of First Nations or Aboriginal theatre in Japanese translation and 'colour blind' casting? Is a Canadian nô drama that tells a story of the Japanese diaspora a performance in cultural appropriation or dramatic innovation? In looking for answers to these questions, Theatre Translation Theory and Performance in Contemporary Japan extends discussions of theatre translation through a selective investigation of six Western plays, translated and staged in Japan since the 1960s, with marginalized tongues and bodies at their core. The study begins with an examination of James Baldwin's Blues for Mister Charlie, followed by explorations of Michel Marc Bouchard's Les feluettes ou La repetition d'un drame romantique, Tomson Highway's The Rez Sisters and Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing, Roger Bennett's Up the Ladder, and Daphne Marlatt's The Gull: The Steveston t Noh Project. Native Voices, Foreign Bodies locates theatre translation theory and practice in Japan in the post-war Showa and Heisei eras and provokes reconsideration of Western notions about the complex interaction of tongues and bodies in translation and theatre when they travel and are reconstituted under different cultural conditions.

Performing the Politics of Translation in Modern Japan sheds new light on the adoption of concepts that motivated political theatres of resistance for nearly a century and even now underpin the collective understanding of the Japanese nation. Grounded in the aftermath of the Meiji Restoration in 1868 and analyzing its legacy on stage, this book tells the story of the crucial role that performance and specifically embodied memory played in the changing understanding of the imported Western concepts of "liberty" (jiyū) and "revolution" (kakumei). Tracing the role of the post-Restoration movement itself as an important touchstone for later performances, it examines two key moments of political crisis. The first of these is the Proletarian Theatre Movement of the 1920s and '30s, in which the post-Restoration years were important for theorizing the Japanese communist revolution. The second is in the postwar years when Rights Movement theatre and thought again featured as a vehicle for understanding the present through the past. As such, this book presents the translation of "liberty" and "revolution", not through a one-to-one correspondence model, but rather as a many-to-many relationship. In doing so, it presents a century of evolution in the dramaturgy of resistance in Japan. This book will be useful to students and scholars of Japanese history, society and culture, as well as literature and translation studies alike.

An anthology of three exciting Japanese adaptations of Shakespeare that engage with issues such as changing family values, racial diversity, the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake and terrorism, together with a contextualizing introduction. The anthology makes contemporary Japanese adaptations of Shakespeare by three independent theatre companies available to a wider English language audience. The three texts are concerned with the social issues Japan faces today and Japan's perception of its cultural history. This unique collection is thus both a valuable resource for the fields of Shakespeare and adaptation studies as well as for a better understanding of contemporary Japanese theatre.

The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Sexuality questions what it would mean to think of sexualities transnationally and explores the way cultural ideas about sex and sexuality are translated across languages. It considers how scholars chart the multilingual rise of the modern sexual sciences in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, how translators, writers, and readers respond to sexual modernities and to what extent the keywords of queer social movements travel across borders. The handbook draws from fields as diverse as translation studies, critical multilingualism studies, comparative literature, European studies, Slavic studies, Middle Eastern studies, Latin American studies, and East Asian studies. This pioneering handbook maps out an emerging brand of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies that approaches sexualities as translational formations. Divided into two parts, the handbook covers: - Theoretical chapters on the interdisciplinary dialogue between translation studies and queer studies - Empirical studies of both canonic and minor scientific, religious, literary, philosophical, and political texts about sex and sexuality in translation across a variety of world languages. With 20 chapters written by leading academics from around the world, The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Sexuality will serve as an important reference for students and scholars in the fields of translation studies, applied linguistics, modern languages, and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies.

Multiple Translation Communities in Contemporary Japan offers a collection of essays that (1) deepens the understanding of the cultural and linguistic diversity of communities in contemporary Japan and how translation operates in this shifting context and circulates globally by looking at some of the ways it is theorized and approached as a significant social, cultural, or political practice, and harnessed by its multiple agents; (2) draws attention to the multi-platform translations of cultural productions such as manga, which are both particular to and popular in Japan but also culturally influential and widely circulated transnationally; (3) poses questions about the range of roles translation has in the construction, performance, and control of gender roles in Japan, and (4) enriches Translation Studies by offering essays that problematize critical notions related to translation. In short, the essays in this book highlight the diversity and ubiquity of translation in Japan as well as the range of methods being used to understand how it is being theorized, positioned, and practiced.

Japan is often regarded as a 'culture of translation'. Oral and written translation has played a vital role in Japan over the centuries and led to a formidable body of thinking and research. This is rooted in a context about which little information has been available outside of Japan in the past. The chapters examine the current state of translation studies as an academic discipline in Japan and a range of historical aspects (for example, translation of Chinese vernacular novels in early modern times, the role of translation in Japan's modernization, changes in stylistic norms in Meiji-period translations, 'thick translation' of indigenous Ainu place names), as well as creative aspects of translation in modern and postwar Japan. Other chapters explore contemporary phenomena such as the intralingual translation of Japanese expressions embedded in English texts emanating from diasporic contexts, the practice of pre-translation or writing for an international audience from the outset, the innovative practice of reverse localization of Japanese video games back into Japanese, and community interpreting practices and research.