Translating Javanese unggah-ungguh into Japanese keigo

A Sociopragmatic study of address terms in Bumi Manusia and Arashi no Naka no Manya-ru

Abstract

This study investigated how Javanese unggah-ungguh address terms were translated into the Japanese keigo system and examined the sociopragmatic mechanisms underlying pragmatic transfer in literary translation. A qualitative descriptive design within a sociopragmatic framework was employed to analyze 70 address-term occurrences, purposively selected from the bilingual corpus of Bumi Manusia and its Japanese translation, Arashi no Naka no Manyaru. The data were analyzed by identifying translation strategies and interpreting the sociopragmatic shifts they generated in terms of politeness, social hierarchy, interpersonal relationships, and cultural identity. The findings revealed four principal translation strategies, namely Retention, Cultural Substitution, Functional Equivalence, and Generalization. Retention emerged as the dominant strategy, accounting for 64.3% of the data, indicating that the translator predominantly preserved culturally specific address forms while allowing their hierarchical meanings to be interpreted contextually within the Japanese honorific system. Cultural Substitution and Functional Equivalence reconstructed interpersonal relationships and institutional roles using culturally appropriate Japanese expressions, whereas Generalization was employed only for highly culture-specific aristocratic titles that lacked suitable equivalents. The study proposed an integrated sociopragmatic mechanism of pragmatic transfer that explained how different translation strategies systematically reconstructed social meaning across two distinct honorific systems. These findings contributed to translation studies and sociopragmatics by providing a comprehensive analytical framework for examining the translation of culturally embedded address terms across languages.