Equivalence in the Romanian translation of Julie Otsuka’s novel The Buddha in the Attic

Abstract

The study highlights how collective identity, culturally specific features, emotion, and ideological aspects, based on race and gender, are either preserved or not in the translation of The Buddha in the Attic, a novel by Julie Otsuka, a contemporary Japanese American writer. The novel tells the heartbreaking story of the Japanese picture brides and uses a narrative technique marked by the repetition of the collective voice “we”. The novel was translated into Romanian in 2013 by Casiana Ioniță, who rendered the original title as Buddha din podul casei. Building this investigation upon the works of scholars such as Eugene Nida (1964), Peter Newmark (1981, 1988), Anton Popovič (1976), Katharina Reiss (1989), Katharina Reiss and Hans Vermeer (1984), and Mona Baker (1992), the research aims to investigate the Romanian translation of The Buddha in the Attic through the lens of equivalence and non-equivalence, focusing on three chapters, “Come, Japanese!” (“Japonezii sunt bine-veniți!”), “Whites” (“Albii”), and “Traitors” (“Trădători”), especially analysing how phrases that carry ideological and cultural features are rendered in the translation. The article reveals how language reflects gender and racial constructs, emphasizing the translator’s role in conveying these aspects across cultural and linguistic contexts. By these means, the phenomenon of non-equivalence appears, where certain items of the ST cannot be completely reproduced in the target language.