<i>Das Bad</i>, de Yoko Tawada: la traducció d'una identitat nòmada

This article analyses the translation into English, German and Spanish of Tawada’s Das Bad (1989), originally written in Japanese, but first published in German. For this purpose, a number of extracts are selected, characterised by the translation prob­lems they pose. These are classified into three categories: metalinguistic translation prob­lems in a single language, problems caused by the contact between Japanese and German in the original text, and problems arising from the Japanese protagonist’s learning of German. For the analysis of these fragments, a study of Tawada’s ideary is made, in which concepts such as identity, physical appearance and skin, and death stand out. The result is a reflection on the topics of Yoko Tawada’s story and on the solutions that the various translations have proposed. The conclusions are that the author’s abstract and complex ideary and reflections, together with the fact that there are two languages in contact in the original text, are factors that lead to a number of linguistic translation problems that are specific to this text.