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Hello, everyone. It is a great pleasure for me to introduce myself to the members of the Nanzan University Alumni network. I am Yasue Kodama. This September, I started working at the Foreign Language Education Center. Before I came to Nanzan University, I spent about 10 years at the Japan Foundation Japanese Language Institute, Urawa, and 17 years at California State University in the United States, teaching Japanese language and culture. My specialty is sociolinguistics, which is the field to study the relationship between society and language, and within which I have focused on the issues of rhetorical discourse grammar in the oral narratives as well as gender and sexuality. Making the most of these areas of my specialty, at the Nanzan University Center for Japanese Studies I am in charge of teaching Language and Culture A and the Intermediate and Advanced Translation classes.

In the former half of the Language and Culture course, taking into account the latest research findings from cognitive linguistics, we look at how different perspectives create a range of ways of viewing things, starting with the concept of self. We also study how this is reflected in the language, being linked to the concept of uchi and soto (in-group and out-group) and the use of honorifics. In the latter half of the course, we look at how social variables such as gender, sexuality, and age affect the use of language. In that process, from the standpoint of social problems or inequality in society, we consider how we may be able to rectify these issues in terms of language.

Sociolinguistic competence is also essential when it comes to translation. Before I came to Nanzan, with the local American students majoring in Japanese who were in my translation class, I translated a Japanese book into English. The book was written about a man called Floyd Schmoe, who, after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, gathered donations from all over the world in order to build houses for the displaced people of Hiroshima in cooperation with Japanese volunteers. This "Peace Housing" project became a symbol of peace.

In this book, the term "kyosei shuyojo" appeared many times, referring to the camps in America where Japanese Americans were interned. The options for translating this includes "evacuation camp", "internment camp", and "incarceration camp", but which of these the translator would choose depends upon their position to the historical fact. Regardless of the recent spread and development of AI translation, the final decision regarding the term to use must be made by the translator.

Now, in Japan, translations of books written by Nobel Prize-winning economists who validated the relationship between their countries' economic affluence and democracy are flying off the shelves. In the future too, translation will surely continue to be an essential job, playing an extremely important role in society as a guide transcending countries and languages.

I look forward to seeing you at Nanzan University.

Yasue Kodama
Professor
Japanese Education Division, Foreign Language Education Center