Invisible Ideology, Audible Difference: Native Perceptions of Translated Male Speech in Japanese Audiovisual Media

This article examines native Japanese viewers’ perceptions of the masculine speech styles attributed to foreign men in the Japanese television segment Shirabete Mitara, focusing on one episode aired on Fuji TV’s online platforms in June 2026. Building on a previous production-oriented analysis of the programme’s voice-over and subtitling strategies, the study shifts the focus to reception, in-vestigating how native speakers perceive and evaluate the masculine-coded linguistic resources (ML) assigned to foreign interviewees. These perceptions are situated within the broader frame-work of language ideologies surrounding male speech, considering how normative assumptions about masculinity inform both translational choices and their reception among Japanese audienc-es. Drawing on the semiotics of stereotype and the notion of linguoracism, the analysis frames the in-formal idiolect assigned to foreign speakers as a potential marker of otherness that naturalizes their exclusion from normative native male speech. Data were collected through a structured question-naire administered to 46 native Japanese speakers, eliciting judgments on the naturalness, appro-priateness, and social meaning of hon’yakuban otokokotoba (translated men’s language) as deployed in the selected episode. The analysis documents respondents’ evaluations of these resources, their degree of metalinguistic awareness of the strategies underlying their attribution to foreign speakers, and the indexical meanings they actually associate with the marked forms.