From one Place to an 'Other": Meanings, Ideologies, Identities, and Representations on the Covers of Japanese Self-Help Translations

This study addresses gaps in paratextual, translation, and cultural theory research concerning the covers of Japanese self-help book translations. The study looks at five book covers of The Courage to be Disliked: the original Japanese and four culturally Western English translations from Australia, the UK, the US, and Canada. This study uses a novel approach to Multimodal Discourse Analysis specific to cross-cultural self-help book covers based on John Bateman’s GeM model. My results indicate that elements on the covers create disparate meanings between the original Japanese version and the English translations. In addition, the difference in meanings on the covers influence which ideologies and identities are represented on the covers. Ultimately, although the Japanese cover focuses on the book’s ability to provide the expertise of Alfred Adler on self-enlightenment, the English translations centre on the foreignness of the book, representing the book’s content, source text, and source culture as ‘Other’.