Quantität als Bewertungsmaßstab literarischer Übersetzungen : Prolegomena zur Etablierung eines japanisch-deutschen Äquivalenzwertes

Taking up Arno Schmidt’s so-called enlargement factor of 1.1 German letters for 1 English letter in carefully executed English-German literary translations, samples of some thirty computationally reorganized (kana-basis, punctuation marks) modern Japanese novels and short stories are compared with their German-language versions. German texts are counted as running texts. Assuming a rather wide preliminary range of acceptability, the results show that texts containing less than 1.95 German signs (punctuation marks and spaces included) per Japanese sign are too tight and scarce or have been cut, and that texts with 2.45 or more signs either contain numerous explanatory additions, or the translator simply has chatted. The article further reports corresponding figures for five Japanese translations of German literary works and includes a warning to use quantity only as a tandem-factor in evaluating literary translations.