Transliterating Icelandic names into Japanese Katakana Words. An Exploratory Study.

Abstract

This study aims to discover which of several possible ways of transcribing Icelandic personal names into Japanese will come closest to the original Icelandic pronunciation in the subjects’ estimation. It identifies and examines eight discrete mismatches of sound be - tween Japanese and Icelandic and reports on a survey of Iceland ic and Japanese speakers’ response to various solutions. Three groups of subjects, Icelandic first-year students of Japanese, Ice land ic secondyear students of Japanese, and Japanese native speakers, were asked to listen to a recording of several possible transliterations and choose the version that they thought approximated the original Icelandic pronunciation most closely. The overall results of the experiment show common trends for both Japanese and Icelandic subjects in each of the eight types of sound. nonetheless, cross-linguistic differences evidently affected the word choice in some cases. a more detailed analysis is needed, based on a larger data sample, especially for those instances in which Japanese and Icelandic subjects showed divergent tendencies. names that did not follow the trends outlined in the test results should also be examined further.