Abstract:

Introduction:
Culture has original elements at the area. How do we explain such objects to foreign visitors? Translation means to replace some words with other similar words in other cultures. They are not exactly same. Do students understand other cultures with such standardizing?
We developed an application in Nikko, one of the world heritage sites in Japan. We set a quiz function in the application in order to inform local cultural objects for students, considering not only Japanese traditional contents, but also traditional color, sound and old expressions. As an example of old expression , when an user fail the quiz, the comment is not “Fuseikai (incorrect)”, but is “Munen（That's a shame.）” Japanese old people do not tell others to his/her failure clearly. Contents of this application were translated into English, Chinese, and Thai. However, the quiz function was not translated. Because if we translate the expression directly, foreign visitors would not understand the meanings. Then we started to research translation of cultural objects.

Our surveys:
We had a survey about linguistic landscape at Nikko main street in 2017 and had 2 questionnaires. One questionnaire was for foreign students. The other was the impression about “Dragon” and “Ryu”. Ryu (in Japanese) often translate into Dragon (in English), which is drawn as a characteristic object in Nikko.
(1) Evaluation about linguistic landscapes in Nikko by florigen students
Each student evaluated 30 pictures taken the previous year at the main street. (n=40, Nationalities: 15 countries) Not only accurate translation without errors, but also pictures or photos with translation, possibly some errors, but trying to convey some meaning, were evaluated high. Whether they like travels and satisfaction rating had positive correlation with r=0.409. Motivation to know the object was important. In addition, the same linguistic landscape may affect differently depending on the native language of the visitors. Those with higher English proficiency tended to notice errors in English and tried to correct them while those with lower proficiency tried to enjoy with pictures and photos.
(1) Ryu and Dragon-translation of cultural word-
Another survey was about “Ryu” and “Dragon” in 2019. Most of respondents were Japanese. 79.7% of them answered that “Dragon” was a good enough translation of “Ryu”. However, the impression of Ryu and Dragon was not same. (Dragon :n=96, Ryu：n=79. multiple answers) Both receive high ratings in “Strong” and “Big”. “Holy” gets 49.6% for “Ryu”, but 26.0％ for “Dragon” . In addition, we had the same questionnaire to foreign visitors (n=87). Only 11.5% foreign visitors answered “Dragon” was “Holy”. Though 32.2% of them answered Dragon was “Oriental” (cf. Western 8.05%), they seemed not to figure out oriental Dragon (Ryu) as a holy messenger of the deity.

Conclusion:
Looking at the same landscape or reading the same words, acceptance of people is not always same. According to our surveys, if students notice something would be different and be interested in such original parts, it will be the first step to get to other culture for multicultural communication. In other words, if students just read or look at other cultural objects, they may understand less than they think. Such surveys will be the gate to learn intercultural language learning.

Keywords:

Linguistic landscape, Culture, Originality, Translation, Intercultural Contact.