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All Levels Do not record or livestream this session Poster
Challenges in Translating English Graded Readers for L2 Japanese Learners
In this presentation, we will share the experiences we gained while translating 30 graded readers for elementary-level L2 English learners into Japanese. The readers we translated are from the Cengage Foundations Reading Library series. Our work went beyond simple translations; it involved carefully adjusting lexical choices and sentence structures to ensure that each translated book was appropriately graded for its target audience of L2 Japanese learners. The framework we used is based on a widely used Japanese language textbook, GENKI: An Integrated Course in Elementary Japanese. Specifically, we divided Genki’s 23 lessons into 6 levels according to its vocabulary and grammar lists, and translated the 30 books into one of these 6 levels. Japanese extensive reading materials are limited in number, but translating from English graded readers could greatly expand availability, offering learners more diverse and accessible content.
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Yoko Ikeda is a professor at Ibaraki University, Japan. Her publications include the co-authored Genki an Integrated Course in Elementary Japanese, Kanji Look and Learn and Genki Tadoku Books.
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Mitsue Tabata-Sandom (PhD) is a senior lecturer (equivalent to US Associate Professor) at Massey University in New Zealand. Her research interests include Extensive Reading, belief studies, Japanese-English bilingualism, and metaphor analysis. She has provided graded readers to learners of Japanese since 2017 on a website called Yomimono Ippai [Lots of Stories] with like-minded collaborators.
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Mieko Sakai is a professor in Global Education and Intercultural Advancement Center (GAIA) at Oita University in Kyushu. She received her M.A. in Japanese from University of Wisconsin, Madison. She has been teaching Japanese to international students for over 20 years. She has developed several online Japanese learning materials, focusing on topics such as collocations and paraphrasing between written and spoken language. She is a co-authore of Genki Japanese Graded Readers and has also co-translated 『言語教育における多読』 from Teaching Extensive Reading in Another Language (Italics).
