Abstract

This paper reveals the hybrid aspect of the ‘Comfort Women’ testimony and zanalyzes how it is translated back into the language of the New and Old Empire. The ‘Comfort Women’ issue has been recognized as a boundary called the ‘border’ that was solidified after the end of the Pacific War, but the wartime sexual violence system called ‘comfort station’ has expanded along the ‘front line’. The front line created an area different from that of the existing public power, and especially at the linguistic level, it formed a hybrid language by multinational subjects. Therefore, the victim’s testimony about the war does not appear homogeneously in the official language of the nation-state. In the early days of the study, when ‘finding the truth’ was a priority, the heterogeneous and hybrid language inherent in victim testimony was largely eliminated. However, since the 2000s, the hybridity of testimony has begun to appear in the text by dictating the victim’s spoken language. And it became more visible in earnest in the process of being translated into English and Japanese. This paper visualizes the gap between the heterogeneous language spoken by the testator and the meaning of the testator’s self-interpretation, and sees that this gap reveals violent language conditions and the agency of victims who survived such situations. In addition, as hybrid languages were translated into English and Japanese, it was analyzed that they belonged to or deviated from the new national grammar system. The translation aspect of the testimony critically examines what uniqueness or specificity of the ‘Comfort Women’ issue erases in exchange for acquiring universality as it moves to the global historical horizon.