transliteration or transcription? ("honkoku" no honyaku)

[Lewis Cook]

A question: with regard to Japanese, what might be the distinction between a transcription and a transliteration? For many years, whenever required to translate the Japanese “honkoku,” I've punted with the phrase “typographical transcription,” intending thereby to refer to the act or process of redacting (in the broad sense of preparing for publication) a manuscript in pre-modern cursive for reproduction by mechanical means using any well-defined modern glyph set. 

Judging from entries in the Shorter OED, though, I wonder whether “transliteration” isn't the more appropriate term for this process and its result, given that (1) although the character sets of pre-modern (loosely defined) Japanese cursive scripts – employing whatever combination of Sinitic graphemes, hentai-gana, diacritics, ligatures, etc. – certainly overlap with modern typographical character sets, the two are not in any sense fully congruent, and (2) only if they were so would ‘transcription’ seem to be the appropriate word.

I realize that more than one question (and considerable confusion) may be involved here. Any help would be appreciated.  

L Cook

[Paul Atkins]

Dear Professor Cook,

I too have been using "transcription" as a translation for honkoku, but the next time I have to, I will use "transliteration," following your hint.  "Transcription" appears to entail the conversion of speech into writing, while "transliteration" the transfer of writing from one system into another.  The etymologies might suggest the opposite (crossing reading, crossing writing), but of course usage rules.  The question seems then to be whether historical kana and contemporary kana (to say nothing of old kanji and new kanji) constitute separate writing systems.  As you say, it's true they overlap but they don't seem equivalent to me either.

Paul Atkins

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[Patrick Reinhart Schwemmer]

Dear Professors Cook and Atkins,

Absolutely. Only in 1900 was 一音一字 prescribed, and the de-familiarization involved in realizing the expansive and free nature of the older system(s) is quite fresh and liberating. I'm very interested in this.

At the same time, unless the text is doing things with the graphs that cannot be replicated in modern "hiragana, katakana, kanji", as in the MYS (or indeed, as I have found, even in some Nara ehon/emaki), I wonder if Japanese especially might not find this concern trivial. It's as if someone were to come along and say that when you modernize the spelling in Shakespeare or Milton you are transliterating between different systems and must not call it "transcription". Sure you are, but does it matter here enough to overrule the convention of recognizing one transhistorical English language behind particular texts and transcribing them into the same, admittedly modern, orthography?

Regarding the English word "transcribe", OED meaning 2.a. is "to write out in other characters", and even meaning 1.a.  includes, "to copy out from an original".

Patrick Schwemmer

--
ⓟ

2013/12/06 11:53、Paul Atkins <pat...@u.washington.edu> のメール：

[joshua mostow]

Dear Lewis,

I drew a distinction between transcription and transliteration in my Pictures of the Heart (Hawaii, 1996), pp. xvii-xviii, arguing against the then-common practice of providing transcriptions of modern Japanese pronunciations of waka and for "transliteration" as the reproduction of the (a) text. I do not think, however, that my transliterations in that work were of a specific manuscript. I was more careful in At the House of Gathered Leaves (Hawaii, 2004). I still make  this distinction between a transcription (how something would be pronounced today in modern Japanese) and a transliteration (the reproduction of a specific text/manuscript), but in the wider world the latter is apparently called "diplomatic transcription." Perhaps Laura Moretti, from whom I learned this term, could enlighten us.

Cheers,

Joshua

Dear Professor Cook,

I too have been using "transcription" as a translation for honkoku, but the next time I have to, I will use "transliteration," following your hint.  "Transcription" appears to entail the conversion of speech into writing, while "transliteration" the transfer of writing from one system into another.  The etymologies might suggest the opposite (crossing reading, crossing writing), but of course usage rules.  The question seems then to be whether historical kana and contemporary kana (to say nothing of old kanji and new kanji) constitute separate writing systems.  As you say, it's true they overlap but they don't seem equivalent to me either.

Paul Atkins

On Dec 5, 2013, at 5:23 PM, Lewis Cook <lc...@earthlink.net> wrote:

A question: with regard to Japanese, what might be the distinction between a transcription and a transliteration? For many years, whenever required to translate the Japanese "honkoku," I've punted with the phrase "typographical transcription," intending thereby to refer to the act or process of redacting (in the broad sense of preparing for publication) a manuscript in pre-modern cursive for reproduction by mechanical means using any well-defined modern glyph set.

Judging from entries in the Shorter OED, though, I wonder whether "transliteration" isn't the more appropriate term for this process and its result, given that (1) although the character sets of pre-modern (loosely defined) Japanese cursive scripts - employing whatever combination of Sinitic graphemes, hentai-gana, diacritics, ligatures, etc. - certainly overlap with modern typographical character sets, the two are not in any sense fully congruent, and (2) only if they were so would 'transcription' seem to be the appropriate word.

[Ethan Bushelle]

Dear Professor Cook,

There is a special edition of the Iwanami Shoten journal, “Bungaku,” on “Sôkô no jidai,” or “Age of Manuscripts,” (11-5, 2010). The article by Yamamoto Shingo, “Honkoku, honji no genkai,” elaborates on the distinction between “honji” and “honkoku.” The latter is defined as a “faithful” (chuujitsu) reproduction of the original text into a typset edition and is often referred to by scholars in Japan today as “katsujika.” The former is a term introduced by a Japanese scholar of Western history, Kamei Takahiro, and, I think, is a translation of the English term, transliteration. According to his definition, the term, “honji,” places emphasis on _interpreting_ (yomitoku) the character system (moji taikei) of the manuscript into a contemporary system.

 

Yamamoto points to the limits of faithfully reproducing the original manuscript in a modern character system. Although his skepticism applies to both honkoku and honji, he seems to prefer the term honji to honkoku, as it emphasizes that "katsujika" is an act of interpretation. This view, I think, aligns well with Prof. Cook’s suggestion.

 

Best,

Ethan Bushelle

 

PhD Candidate

Dept of East Asian Languages & Civilizations

Harvard University

On Fri, Dec 6, 2013 at 12:34 PM, joshua mostow <jmo...@mail.ubc.ca> wrote:

Dear Lewis,

I drew a distinction between transcription and transliteration in my Pictures of the Heart (Hawaii, 1996), pp. xvii-xviii, arguing against the then-common practice of providing transcriptions of modern Japanese pronunciations of waka and for "transliteration" as the reproduction of the (a) text. I do not think, however, that my transliterations in that work were of a specific manuscript. I was more careful in At the House of Gathered Leaves (Hawaii, 2004). I still make  this distinction between a transcription (how something would be pronounced today in modern Japanese) and a transliteration (the reproduction of a specific text/manuscript), but in the wider world the latter is apparently called "diplomatic transcription." Perhaps Laura Moretti, from whom I learned this term, could enlighten us.

Cheers,

Joshua

Dear Professor Cook,

I too have been using "transcription" as a translation for honkoku, but the next time I have to, I will use "transliteration," following your hint.  "Transcription" appears to entail the conversion of speech into writing, while "transliteration" the transfer of writing from one system into another.  The etymologies might suggest the opposite (crossing reading, crossing writing), but of course usage rules.  The question seems then to be whether historical kana and contemporary kana (to say nothing of old kanji and new kanji) constitute separate writing systems.  As you say, it's true they overlap but they don't seem equivalent to me either.

Paul Atkins

On Dec 5, 2013, at 5:23 PM, Lewis Cook <lc...@earthlink.net> wrote:

A question: with regard to Japanese, what might be the distinction between a transcription and a transliteration? For many years, whenever required to translate the Japanese "honkoku," I've punted with the phrase "typographical transcription," intending thereby to refer to the act or process of redacting (in the broad sense of preparing for publication) a manuscript in pre-modern cursive for reproduction by mechanical means using any well-defined modern glyph set.

Judging from entries in the Shorter OED, though, I wonder whether "transliteration" isn't the more appropriate term for this process and its result, given that (1) although the character sets of pre-modern (loosely defined) Japanese cursive scripts - employing whatever combination of Sinitic graphemes, hentai-gana, diacritics, ligatures, etc. - certainly overlap with modern typographical character sets, the two are not in any sense fully congruent, and (2) only if they were so would 'transcription' seem to be the appropriate word.

I realize that more than one question (and considerable confusion) may be involved here. Any help would be appreciated. 

L Cook

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PhD Candidate

Department of East Asian Languages & Civilizations

Harvard University

[Marc Miyake]

Dear all,

In linguistic usage, I've seen a distinction between "transcription"
and "transliteration" similar to Prof. Mostow's: e.g., てふ would be
"transcribed" in modern standard Japanese pronunciation as "chō" but
"transliterated" as <tefu>. To me transcription represents
pronunciation, whereas transliteration is an attempt to mechanically
replicate graphic distinctions in one script in another: e.g., て as
<te> and ふ as <fu> even when combined. Ideally, transliteration in
this sense includes all information in the original and *excludes* all
information not in the original. A transcription "chō" does not tell
us how the original was spelled (てふ? てう? ちやう? ちょう?), whereas a
transliteration does. Conversely, the transliteration <tefu> does not
tell us that てふ is pronounced "chō".

Typesetting premodern Japanese texts in modern Japanese script to me
seems to fall into a gray area between these two. It is not
transcription in the above sense unless all kanazukai is totally
modernized to indicate pronunciation. Nor is it exact transliteration
in the above sense unless all premodern kana distinctions are
accounted for somehow (in theory one could use modern kana with
superscript or subscript numerals to indicate those distinctions). But
if I had to choose a term in English, it would be transliteration,
since the result is a one-to-one character approximation of the
original text (even if not all the original distinctions are
maintained).

Marc Miyake

On Thu, Dec 5, 2013 at 5:34 PM, joshua mostow <jmo...@mail.ubc.ca> wrote:
> Dear Lewis,
>
> I drew a distinction between transcription and transliteration in my
> Pictures of the Heart (Hawaii, 1996), pp. xvii-xviii, arguing against the
> then-common practice of providing transcriptions of modern Japanese
> pronunciations of waka and for "transliteration" as the reproduction of the
> (a) text. I do not think, however, that my transliterations in that work
> were of a specific manuscript. I was more careful in At the House of
> Gathered Leaves (Hawaii, 2004). I still make this distinction between a
> transcription (how something would be pronounced today in modern Japanese)
> and a transliteration (the reproduction of a specific text/manuscript), but
> in the wider world the latter is apparently called "diplomatic
> transcription." Perhaps Laura Moretti, from whom I learned this term, could
> enlighten us.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Joshua
>
>

> Dear Professor Cook,
>
>
> I too have been using "transcription" as a translation for honkoku, but the
> next time I have to, I will use "transliteration," following your hint.
> "Transcription" appears to entail the conversion of speech into writing,
> while "transliteration" the transfer of writing from one system into
> another. The etymologies might suggest the opposite (crossing reading,
> crossing writing), but of course usage rules. The question seems then to be
> whether historical kana and contemporary kana (to say nothing of old kanji
> and new kanji) constitute separate writing systems. As you say, it's true
> they overlap but they don't seem equivalent to me either.
>
>
> Paul Atkins
>
>
>
> On Dec 5, 2013, at 5:23 PM, Lewis Cook <lc...@earthlink.net> wrote:
>
>
> A question: with regard to Japanese, what might be the distinction between a
> transcription and a transliteration? For many years, whenever required to
> translate the Japanese "honkoku," I've punted with the phrase "typographical
> transcription," intending thereby to refer to the act or process of
> redacting (in the broad sense of preparing for publication) a manuscript in
> pre-modern cursive for reproduction by mechanical means using any
> well-defined modern glyph set.
>
>
> Judging from entries in the Shorter OED, though, I wonder whether
> "transliteration" isn't the more appropriate term for this process and its
> result, given that (1) although the character sets of pre-modern (loosely

> defined) Japanese cursive scripts - employing whatever combination of
> Sinitic graphemes, hentai-gana, diacritics, ligatures, etc. - certainly

[Michael Pye]

Dear List,

As orginally pointed out, there may be more than one question here,
and in fact there are two, or two groups of questions.
One is, what is meant by J. honkoku and how can it best be translated
(which might depend on the specifics).
The other main question is the use of "transliterate" and "transcribe"
in English. I would like to comment on the latter. If these terms are
not suitable for honkoku, tant pis.

Preamble: I don't subscribe to the idea that usage, i.e. just any
usage, rules all. Just because an intended meaning for a word can be
documented and it therefore gets into usage based dictionaries, it
doesn't mean that we have to follow such usage or that it is
responsible to do so. Otherwise we might as well all speak
pigeon-language now, or spice up our texts with Japanese English, or
write doesnt instead of doesn't.

To the point.

Transliterate (and derivatives) emphasizes the act of turning a
written word or expression from one script into another. Thus you can
have Chinese transliterations of Sanskrit words, as opposed to
translations of them. Or you could transliterate a word or a phrase
from Greek, and then you could go on to translate it, or not.

Transcription throws the emphasis on to a text, long or short, as
opposed to specific words. Thus for example one could transcribe the
Heart Sutra from Devanagari script or Kanbun, into Roman script, so
that it's somehow more accessible for students (or believers) who are
more used to the Latin alphabet.

Transcription does not in itself involve translation. So for more
examples, a mediaeval Latin ms might be transcribed from an ms into
script more easily readable by moderns, perhaps using breaks where
there were none, etc. Or the memoirs of my father-in-law hand-written
in Gothic style could be transcribed into modern German typescript for
the benefit of his descendants (as oneof them as done). In this case
certain obsolete letters would be transliterated as part of the wider
process of transcription.

However, transcription does not necessarily involve transliteration,
because the same script might be used, but only in a clearer or
regularised form. For example capital letters at the beginning of
Gospels might not be presented with little pictures of birds in the
flourishes.

Of course there are further terms which are related. So nowadays we
also have "a transcript" of a speech, made from a recording. That's
fine. The transfer being made there is not from one script to another
but from one medium to another (even though both may be digital) -
that reminds me of a little job I have to do sometime.) But these are
precisely further terms, not pre-modern (so we shouldn't discuss them
on this list: smile).

But I do think it would be better not to muddle up rather well-worn
English usage. Only after that does it make sense to ask how to
translate honkoku (which I admit I've never tried to do), which seems
to be more about reproducing an ancient text in usable form in a
manner which may or may not involve transcription (in the usual
English sense). It could even be photomechanical nowadays, couldn't
it (?). But in any case it would not necessarily be a transcription
(of a text), which involves going from one script to another.

It's no good expecting a Japanese word to have a correct, or even most
appropriate, English equivalent. Take the word "résumé" as used for
public lectures in Japan. Typically this doesn't mean a "summary" as
one might expect, but a rather long transcript from an original
lecture text which may be a bit longer. Yawn...

thanks for reading,
Michael Pye


Zitat von Marc Miyake <amrit...@gmail.com>:

With all best wishes, Michael Pye
...............................................................
Professor (em.) of the Study of Religions, University of Marburg
Research Associate in Buddhist Studies, Otani University, Kyoto
...............................................................
For collected essays on method and theory, with case studies, see:
Strategies in the Study of Religions (2013):
http://www.degruyter.com/view/product/184080
http://www.degruyter.com/view/product/184339
Or for this and other work see profile on <academia.edu>

[Keller Kimbrough]

Hello everyone, 

For right or wrong, since modern Japanese honkoku are published using standardized fonts in a mechanical printing process, I often use the word "typeset" rather than "transliterate" or "transcribe."  For example, I recently wrote, 

Translated from the late Muromachi-period nara ehon emaki in the possession of the British Library, typeset in Tsuji Eiko, Zaigai Nihon emaki no kenkyū to shiryō (Tokyo: Kasama Shoin, 1999), 353-70.

In the case of an annotated edition of a particular text, I often write "typeset and annotated in . . ."  I hope that no one will convince me that this is inappropriate, because I have been doing it for a long time now! 

Incidentally, regarding "usage" as an issue in lexicography, in 1959 my father compiled and sold a small, pamphlet-like dictionary called the "Swinging Syllables Beatnik Dictionary."  He advertised it in Playboy Magazine and sold copies through the mail for $1 each.  I mentioned to him a couple of years ago that his humble dictionary was recently cited in a scholarly dictionary of American slang.  He thought that was pretty funny, because, as he said, since he wasn't a beatnik and he didn't know enough beatnik slang to fill out a dictionary, he supplemented his "research" with a bunch of words and phrases that sounded to him like things that beatniks might say.  (There weren't any beatniks in Memphis, Tennessee in 1959, so he had to be creative.)  But his dictionary turned out to be a minor best-seller (much to the chagrin of his father, who liked to emphasize the importance of an honest day's work), and many of his newly coined phrases no doubt caught on with aspiring counterculturists.  Regarding usage, then, his dictionary seems to have been both descriptive and prescriptive.  But then again, isn't that the case with all dictionaries? 

Please excuse the digression. 

Best wishes, 

Keller

R. Keller Kimbrough

Associate Professor

Dept. of Asian Languages and Civilizations

279 University of Colorado, Boulder

Boulder, CO  80309-0279

keller.k...@colorado.edu

[NELSON Steven]

Just a short word from a very occasional contributor.

Working in the field of Japanese music history, I have used the expression "typographical reprint" as a translation of "honkoku" since the 1980s. I'm not sure how carefully I thought about it when I first used it, but, like Keller, I do hope that my translation will not be judged as inappropriate! 

Cheers,

Steven Nelson

[Lewis Cook]

Thanks for so many edifying responses to my query. The consensus seems to be that 'transliteration' may be more precise than 'transcription' in the case of modernizing Japanese manuscripts for typesetting, but that there are enough grey areas to keep things ambiguous, and that the differences may or may not be consequential. Let me respond very selectively to a few of several comments & suggestions.

Patrick R. Schwemmer notes the vagaries of OED definitions: point taken. (My impression is that OED gathers attestations profligately and without judgement - other than "obsolete" or "rare." A fine resource for winning arguments.) He also raises the question of triviality, the only answer to which is, I think, that there will always those who feel compelled to refer to facsimiles if not originals, a fair enough way of keeping textuists (see below) employed. Mr. Schwemmer further suggests that there is a convention of recognizing "transhistorical" language, to which I'm not inclined to agree: would reserve this for another occasion...

Joshua Mostow addresses the relation between (modern) orthoepy and (historical) transliteration, if I understand correctly (another topic for another day?) and touches on the question of diplomatic transcription. The ideal behind the latter seems simple enough; the reality endlessly complicated. On p. 391 of his _Textual Scholarship - An Introduction_ (Garland, 1994) D.C. Greetham (identified in a review-blurb on the back of a paperback edition as "a medievalist and a textuist") writes that "the diplomatic transcript reproduces as many features of the manuscript as possible in a modern typesetting, including exact lineation, spelling, and abbreviations, which are not expanded. Where features of the manuscript cannot be clearly reproduced . . . these are recorded in the apparatus. Thus all mended, blotted, deleted, decorated, or altered letter-forms are mentioned in the apparatus." By this definition (placing the diplomatic transcription somewhere between a facsimile and a more or less freely modernized transliteration), the SNKBT edition of _Genjimonogatari_ (to cite an example close to home) based on the Oshima-bon manuscript would count as diplomatic transcription, in the sense that a reader referring to both the typographic (modernized) text and the (superbly meticulous) apparatus should, in effect, be able to reconstruct every signifying mark in the manuscript (depending on how signifying is interpreted and what is deemed to be a mark).

Ethan Bushelle's citation of the special issue of Iwanami Bungaku on honkoku and honji is welcome news - I wish this were more readily available than it appears to be. The term "honkoku" has early antecedents in Chinese (referring to transcriptions of texts engraved in stone onto paper) whereas "honji" does not seem to occur at all until quite recently and only in Japanese, as Bushelle asserts. I'm not sure how the distinction might pertain to matters of interpretation - another question best left in flux -

L Cook

[Chris Kern]

The SNKBT edition of Genji is only partially diplomatic; it takes the usual position of claiming to identify the changes that belong to the hand of the "original writer" of the manuscript and ignoring everything else.  It's also not entirely a transcript because they do occasionally bring in readings from other manuscripts, although they do (for the most part) identify what is being added or changed.  Eiichi Shibuya's transcriptions of the Myoyu-bon and Oshima-bon on his Genji site are much closer to diplomatic transcriptions -- he omits the dakuten and does not indicate cases where added material has been later erased, so it's not perfect, but it's close.

Incidentally I looked at the SNKBT and I didn't see the term 翻刻 anywhere; they used the term 本文を立てる in the back material.

-Chris

L Cook

[Lewis Cook]

On Dec 10, 2013, at 11:17 PM, Chris Kern wrote:

> The SNKBT edition of Genji is only partially diplomatic; it takes the usual position of claiming to identify the changes that belong to the hand of the "original writer" of the manuscript and ignoring everything else. It's also not entirely a transcript because they do occasionally bring in readings from other manuscripts, although they do (for the most part) identify what is being added or changed. Eiichi Shibuya's transcriptions of the Myoyu-bon and Oshima-bon on his Genji site are much closer to diplomatic transcriptions -- he omits the dakuten and does not indicate cases where added material has been later erased, so it's not perfect, but it's close.
>
> Incidentally I looked at the SNKBT and I didn't see the term 翻刻 anywhere; they used the term 本文を立てる in the back material.
>
> -Chris

Yes, of course, Chris, but while I don't mean to quibble, a diplomatic transcription is by definition partial. How complete a transcription is necessary for the purposes of a proper reading of the text without firsthand examination of the manuscript is and will always be a matter of interpretation. Which physical characteristics of the manuscript signify, i.e. count as marks or traces, and which do not?

Shibuya's transcriptions (I haven't read these carefully - taking your word for it) appear to be more replete than those of the SNKBT Genji (which, after all, was published under the constraints of appealing to a large, fairly general audience), but they are still only partial (asymptotic approximations of the originals, say).

A parable, if you don't mind: Once upon a time I was leafing through a late Muromachi manuscript in the Keio U. library with some colleagues. Between two leaves (opened at random) lay a scrap of thread - apparently the same as that used to bind the manuscript - and a clot of dust (excreta or exuviae of silverfish?) I made a move to get rid of these but was restrained and advised that everything in the archives is there to be preserved. But of course - who knows? DNA sampling of bookworm faeces might some day offer clues about the provenance of a manuscript. The scrap of thread might be a cryptic message from a collector (recall the scraps of detonator wire that served as a signature in Le Carre's _Little Drummer Girl_,) Or not. Time may tell. Meanwhile, as I was advised by a Japanese bibliophile, don't trust anyone's honkoku but your own.