Translating the untranslatable: A Yiddish text in Japanese rendering

Abstract

The paper collects some Yiddish words which do not lend themselves to easy translation and investigates the way they are rendered into Japanese. This is done with the example of the 1999 Japanese translation of Yitskhok Katsenelson’s Song of the murdered Jewish people . Japanese renderings of selected fifteen lexemes reflecting the culture, religion and everyday life of the Yiddish speakers are gathered, analyzed as for their structure and compared with their German, English, Spanish, French, Polish and Russian counterparts. ַאד cording cording