Translation of Japanese Personal Pronouns and Their Connotations to Finnish and English Through the Movie “Your Name.”

Abstract

Japanese personal pronouns are known for their connotations, which include gender, various stages of formality and social relations. This study asks the question of how Japanese personal pronouns with their complexities can be translated to Finnish and English. The goal of this study is to observe how nuances in Japanese pronouns have been translated and bring attention to said methods used. The material of the study is the 2017 animation movie Your Name. directed by Makoto Shinkai. The full dialogue of the movie was analyzed with various pronouns and connotations in mind and examples of interest were discussed thoroughly. The movie features characters from the capital Tokyo and a small town called Itomori. Characters from Itomori speak in a dialect, which the Finnish translator Janne Mökkönen has used to his advantage by making said characters use Finnish dialectal and colloquial personal pronouns. This proved to be a working strategy to not only convey that the characters speak in a dialect, but also to show different levels of formality in speech between the characters. English on the other hand did not appear as capable at translating connotations between English and Japanese pronouns. This can be attributed to the small variety of personal pronouns in the English language.