JAPANESE PROVERBS BETWEEN EQUIVALENCE AND COMPARATIVE TRANSLATION FROM JAPANESE AND ENGLISH INTO ROMANIAN. AN ANALYSIS FROM THE SEMANTIC AND PRAGMATIC POINT OF VIEW

The current paper takes a comparative look at a selection of Japanese proverbs and their translation into English to their Romanian equivalents. The English translation belongs to David Galeff, the author of the book ‘Japanese Proverbs. Wit and Wisdom’ from which stems the selection of proverbs which are the object of the current analysis. The Romanian translation applies two methods. It tries to find an equivalent in Romanian, both in terms of wit i.e. wording or sense and in terms of wisdom i.e. meaning or reference. As such the two perspectives of analysis are semantic and pragmatic. The aim is firstly to find an equivalent in meaning and reference to a relevant wisdom inspired by reality and life. If such an equivalent is not found, alternative translations are attempted using other translation procedures, such as modulation or even adaptation. The theoretical framework used is the one Vinay and Dalbernet outlined in their ‘Comparative Stylistics of French and English: A Methodology for Translation’. This is a translational attempt to look towards the East and towards the West and see how different and how similar they are in the way they understand life and express that understanding. The aim of the analysis is to see to what extent it can identify corresponding ways of wording or equivalent forms of expression in Romanian for the wit and the wisdom incapsulated in the Japanese proverbs, via the English language