Japanese Synesthetic Expressions And Their Chinese Translations

Sensory expressions are a word expressing a perception through your sense of sight,hearing, smell, taste, and touch. In general, the expression is composed of several wordsthat belong to same categories, such as “soft touch” or “sweet taste”. However, there arecombined words that belong to different categories, such as “soft color”,“sweet smell”,or “bright voice”. Such expressions are called synesthetic expressions. Synestheticexpressions are metaphors by using two words belonging to different categories of sense.The expression is generally used in your daily life or literary writings.In the previous studies, as to the structure of synesthetic expressions, although theyindicated that their expression are based on metaphor or metonymy, they have noconsideration of effect of the expression which is based on synesthetic expressionspicked from a sentence, and also there are few comparisons of Japanese and Chinese.This thesis intended to compare how Japanese synesthetic expressions are translatedinto Chinese. The reason why Banana Yoshimoto’s novels were dealt in this research isthat it was easy to compare the translation with the original, because there were manyChinese versions of her writings. The research method is to pick a sentence includingsynesthetic expressions, divide them into every five senses and consider structure fromassociations. Synesthetic expressions in her writings are composed of relations ofmetaphor or metonymy. First, metaphor is expression including feelings similar to bothtwo senses. Second, metonymy is expression that a different sense is replaced by anoriginal sense through various experiences. Thus synesthetic expressions are composedof not only senses but also emotions, and by this analysis, the possibility of synestheticexpressions is found.Second, this research compares Chinese translation with the original based ondetailed consideration of the structure of associations. This research found relations ofmetaphor or metonymy in many Chinese versions by associations. But all is nottranslated in the form of synesthetic expressions. This analyzes every similar ordifferent effect of expressions in Japanese and Chinese versions, and shows a newcharacteristic of synesthetic expressions in Banana Yoshimoto’s works.