According to Paul Bensimon, the retranslation hypothesis advocates for a pattern between the first and second translation of a literary work. The hypothesis runs that the second translation (also called “retranslation”) tends to be closer to the original text and more foreignized, while the first translation is farther away from the original and more domesticated to better fit with the norms of the target audience. This paper intends to test this view of the retranslation hypothesis on the two English translations of the Japanese novel バトル・ロワイアル (“Battle Royale”). The study compared proper names and cultural terms from both translations in semantic similarity and from the perspective of the domestication/foreignization theory. The results show that the retranslation has more foreignizing tendencies concerning the translations and the translation strategies of cultural terms, and a closer semantic similarity to the original work regarding proper names. On the other hand, the first translation has a more frequent tendency of using foreignizing translation strategies for proper names. Thus, the results show a partial agreement with the retranslation hypothesis.