On November 10, 2025, Ms. Ryoko Sekiguchi’s lecture titled “Who Trusts Translation? Self-translation between two languages” was held at Komacee East K011 hall, Komaba campus, University of Tokyo, with Prof. Koichiro Kokubun serving as moderator.

Ms. Sekiguchi was born and raised in Japan, studied French at university, and has lived in France for many years, writing in both French and Japanese. In this lecture, she reflected on her recent experience of self-translating texts written in Japanese into French, while comparing it with her previous experience of self-translating from French into Japanese, and discussed her discoveries about the relationship between language and translation, and the significance of self-translation.

When self-translating from French into Japanese, she experienced difficulties in translating her own work well. She used to think this was because she had lived in France for a long time and had become distant from Japanese. However, when she recently tried to translate texts written in Japanese into French, she faced the same difficulties. She explained that she felt a sense of having lost her own French writing style. Through these experiences, Ms. Sekiguchi realized that this difficulty was a common phenomenon that occurs when translating a work into a second language, regardless of whether it is one’s mother tongue or not. She then became conscious that each creative language has its own distinctive writing style. While she writes in two languages, she possesses four writing styles of creative language: “creative language in Japanese,” “language for translating into Japanese,” “creative language in French,” and “language for translating into French,” each with its own distinctive style.

Translation inherently carries the possibility that its content may change when it is translated. In this sense, translation has a certain “inaccuracy” to some extent. When it is translated by another person, it can be understood as “translated literature” and conceived as the relationship between original and translation. However, when the author translates their own work, there arises the danger of creating two originals. Ms. Sekiguchi pointed out that this creates a resistance from language to the existence of two originals, and this represents the difficulty which she faced when self-translating. She stated that self-translation is the process of negotiating with a text that wants to declare “there is only one original.”

Despite such difficulties, there are two reasons why she continues self-translation. One is to take responsibility for the literature to which that language belongs. In her case, this means engaging with French literature, sharing the concerns of French literature, and taking responsibility for it. As the second reason, she pointed out the importance of continuing to feel that language always has more power than the writer. When creating in French, which is t her mother tongue, she cannot obtain the confidence that the text is correct and must construct sentences artificially. This reminds her that writers cannot control language, language is not their possession. Finally, Ms. Sekiguchi emphasized that self-translation is an exceptional experience for writers in which their own mother tongue becomes not their own, but others’.

Report by Niimoto Konomi (EAA Research Assistant)
Photos by Shinhye Hong (EAA Research Assistant)