근대 일본의 번역론과 모리타 시켄(森田思軒)

Abstract

In the present article, I focus on Shiken Morita, one of the prominent translators in Modern Japan, and explore his view on translation. Our main focus is put upon issues such as “How did he construe the act of translation?” and “What was the ideal translation for him?” Morita, who was a translator as well as a newspaper reporter and a critic, wrote about translation itself, in addition to his translation works. He passed away at the age of 36, but his view on translation underwent several changes during his short period of time as a translator. The aim of this article is to analyze these changes, and explore the ways in which his view on translation was manifested in his translation works. For this purpose, I analyze his statements, as found in his essays, in a chronological order. The main findings of this analysis can be summed up as follows. While previous studies have characterized Morita’s translation view in terms of the “literal translation style” and the “style based on the Chinese classics,” these two features being juxtaposed or contrasted, Morita made use of the word-building capacity of Chinese-based words in order to convey the true meaning of the Western traditions on thoughts and created new words. Furthermore, Morita brought a new feature to the traditional Japanese sentences by introducing the reading of two-character Chinese-based words, and in this sense, the frequent use of Chinese-based words does not contradict with the style of literal translation from Western languages.