The Untranslatability of Japanese Onomatopoeia in Advertising: The Case of Food Description

Abstract

Onomatopoetic words constitute a layer of vocabulary that allows to convey  the sounds of nature, as well as physical sensations, emotions, tastes, and odors of objects. In the Russian and English languages, onomatopoeia is employed primarily in the speech of children, whereas in Japanese, these lexical units are found in the everyday speech of individuals of all ages, in media, and in literature. However, they are not used in official documents.

Translating onomatopoetic words from Japanese into English is a challenging task due to the differences in the structure of the two languages, the varying uses of onomatopoeia, and the polysemantic nature of these lexemes preventing the full reflection of the meaning of onomatopoetic words in the target language.

Within the framework of this article, the author examines some aspects of Japanese-English translation of onomatopoetic vocabulary found in the descriptions of food products, in particular, bakery products in the section "bread" (パン), posted on the website of the Japanese convenience store FamilyMart by April 2024. Overall, 63 onomatopoetic words were found in the descriptions of 94 products. This corpus contains five most frequent onomatopoeia words that are examined in detail. Among them are such onomatopoetic words as しっとり shittori, which is used to describe the texture of bread and can be translated as “with soft and moist texture”; “funwari” translated as “fluffy” or “soft”; “honnori” used as an intensifier and can be translated not only as “slightly; faintly”, but also with the help of context, making the translation of other words more specific. Onomatopoetic words such as motchiri, tappuri, kongari, sakusaku, sakkuri, fukkura, mutchiri are also mentioned.

When translating these onomatopoetic words, it is recommended to take into account the context and use translation transformations such as specification or omission.