| dc.description.abstract | The aim of this thesis is to find how frequently the feminine sentence ending particles are used in the translation of English literature into Japanese and to compare its frequency to that of the real-life speech by women in Japan. This thesis deals with the topic of “role language”, which is a peculiar feature of Japanese fiction writing – characters appearing in fictional works will usually speak with features associated with stereotypes assigned to their ‘role’. For example, you can immediately tell if the speaker is a young woman or an elderly man because their speech will be written with certain linguistic characteristics that are unique to them, a combination of first-person pronoun, copula, aspect form, sentence ending particles, specific vocabulary, and other possible linguistic features. Role language as it appears in fiction is always notably different compared to real-life speech spoken by the groups represented. One area we can find copious use of role language is in translated literature. For example, in English we can usually not tell if the speaker’s gender based on linguistic markers alone, but if the speaker is a woman the translated dialogue in Japanese will immediately inform the reader through the identifiable use of role language. To find out how abundant role language is in the dialogue of female characters in literary translations, an analysis of the frequency of appearances of selected sentence endings has been carried out, through the creation of a corpus that notes whether a line in a translated novel has a sentence ending or not. By looking at the results and comparing them to existing data, we can see that the use of role language features in fictionalized dialogue is far more abundant in fiction than in real-life speech. | eng |