Yakuwarigo ‘Role Language’ in Translated Japanese

Representing Interpersonal Relationships in Constructions

Abstract

When speeches delivered in foreign languages are translated into Japanese and broadcast on television, the resulting Japanese often sounds unnatural. Drawing on a small-scale exploratory case study of Japanese copula usage, this study examines such unnatural translated speech as an instance of yakuwarigo ‘role language’ (Kinsui 2003), which indexes non-fluent Japanese speakers. To support this claim, this article argues that fluent Japanese speakers store constructional knowledge that encodes appropriate interpersonal relationships, and that this knowledge can be described within the framework of Relational Morphology (Jackendoff and Audring, 2020). Furthermore, this study highlights the importance of the speaker’s visual image in shaping the perception of translated speech as yakuwarigo and proposes that these translations are multimodal constructs composed of video and textual elements.