Transliterating Icelandic names into Japanese Katakana Words. An Exploratory Study.

This study aims to discover which of several possible ways of transcribing Icelandic personal names into Japanese will come closest to the original Icelandic pronunciation in the subjects’ estimation. It identifies and examines eight discrete mismatches of sound be - tween Japanese and Icelandic and...

Full description

Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Umezawa, Kaoru
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: Milli Mála 2015
Subjects:
Online Access:https://ojs.hi.is/index.php/millimala/article/view/1451
Description
Summary:This study aims to discover which of several possible ways of transcribing Icelandic personal names into Japanese will come closest to the original Icelandic pronunciation in the subjects’ estimation. It identifies and examines eight discrete mismatches of sound be - tween Japanese and Icelandic and reports on a survey of Iceland ic and Japanese speakers’ response to various solutions. Three groups of subjects, Icelandic first-year students of Japanese, Ice land ic secondyear students of Japanese, and Japanese native speakers, were asked to listen to a recording of several possible transliterations and choose the version that they thought approximated the original Icelandic pronunciation most closely. The overall results of the experiment show common trends for both Japanese and Icelandic subjects in each of the eight types of sound. nonetheless, cross-linguistic differences evidently affected the word choice in some cases. a more detailed analysis is needed, based on a larger data sample, especially for those instances in which Japanese and Icelandic subjects showed divergent tendencies. names that did not follow the trends outlined in the test results should also be examined further. Markmið þessarar rannsóknar er að kanna hver þeirra aðferða sem til greina koma við umritun íslenskra mannanafna á japönsku komist næst því að skila íslenskum framburði nafnanna að mati þátttakenda í rannsókninni. Í rannsókninni eru greind átta mismunandi hljóð sem eru án samsvörunar milli tungumálanna og gerð grein fyrir viðbrögðum þátttakenda, sem höfðu y?mist íslensku eða japönsku að móðurmáli, við mismunandi lausnum. Þrír hópar, Íslendingar á fyrsta ári í japönskunámi, Íslendingar á öðru ári í japönskunámi og fólk með japönsku að móðurmáli, voru beðnir að hlusta á hljóðupptöku af nokkrum mögulegum umritunum og velja þá útgáfu sem þeir töldu að kæmist næst upprunalegum íslenskum framburði. Heildarniður staða tilraunarinnar er sú að sömu tilhneigingar gætti hjá bæði japönsku og íslensku þátttakendunum varðandi allar þessar ...