Earticle

While Korean web novels have recently gained an increasing popularity in the domestic market, exports are still in their infancy, in part due to the language barriers. Against this background, this study aims to investigate difficulties related with Korean web novel translation by conducting interviews with four translators of Korean web novels and nine professionals working in a translation company, copyright agencies, content providers, and web novel platforms. The interview results showed difficulties mainly in three aspects: a large volume of texts and weak exports lead to a high cost burden; translating web novels is tricky primarily due to stylistic features, cultural adaptation, and a wide range of sub-genres; and there are systematic problems, particularly insufficient revision procedures and guidelines. Based on these findings, the study provided some useful suggestions and highlighted the need of further research to better understand web novel translation strategies and the work environments of web novel translation.

This study examines the translation strategy of culturemes in the English subtitle of Parasite, a Korean movie by director Bong Joon-ho. The multi-award winning black comedy deals with the conflict between the rich and the poor, a topic which people in every culture can relate to. Together with the timely theme, the film’s English subtitle is considered to have contributed to its global success. This study shows that Darcy Paquet, the subtitle translator of Parasite, carefully chose the translation strategy working in close cooperation with the director. The interviews and press clips on the translator and the director revealed that they actively communicated on how to translate the local elements in the movie into English subtitle so that audiences in other cultures can easily understand the movie, which is the macro translation strategy. This paper categorized 22 culturemes in the movie into 5 groups and found out that 6 different tactics under 2 broad categories of conservation and substitution were used for translation. The analysis shows that although various tactics were used at the micro level, the subtitle as a whole worked in a way to enhance the understanding of foreign audiences, with the aim of domestication at the macro level.

In Korea, despite the comparatively rich provision of translations in museums, museum translation has been under-researched in Translation Studies. The reason can be attributed to the limited perceptions of museum and museum translation here. According to the definition of the International Council of Museums, the term “museum” encompasses diverse institutions such as archeological, ethnographic, historic and natural monuments and sites, botanical and zoological gardens, as well as science centers. In contrast, a narrower definition is generally used here, strictly referring to museums as the repository of artifacts. Also, museum translation tends to be associated only with textual factors or translated materials in museums. Hence, this study reviews related studies overseas, adopting broader concepts of and diverse perspectives on museum translation. Then, with a view to invigorating related research here, this paper explores ways to apply those various approaches to museum translation research in the Korean context. To sum up, it suggests that interdisciplinary perspectives should be applied in research on museum translation here, drawing upon concepts and theoretical frameworks from other disciplines. It is also suggested that museum translation research should examine, to cite Sturge’s (2007) terms, not only “translations in the museum” but also “museums as translations.”

Arabic, Korean and Chinese differ in many aspects including linguistic typology classification, sentence structure, etc. which yield difficulties in translation. The purpose of this study is to examine the translation patterns of Arabic transitives including inanimate subject into Korean and Chinese focusing on the Arabic novel, The Bamboo Stalk, and its Korean and Chinese direct translations. Transitive sentences with inanimate subjects were extracted from the Arabic text and divided into two groups: inanimate subjects with animate objects and inanimate subjects with inanimate objects. The findings showed the similarity between Korean and Chinese in the notion of the inanimate subject and the tendency to render the inanimate subjects of Arabic into other sentence components. Specifically, Arabic inanimate subjects were rendered into adverb phrases, predicates, and objects in both Korean and Chinese TT, while the rendition into a complement was only observed in Chinese. Moreover, the syntactic status of an inanimate subject accompanied by an animate object was more likely to be altered (60.9% in Korean, 62.1% in Chinese), in which case, an animate object was upgraded to a subject of the TT, while the transitive clause was rendered into intransitive or passive phrase.

This study aims to show ideology in the front covers of translated feminist books that have been published since the so-called “Gangnam murder case”. For this purpose, the cover images and titles of 151 Korean translations are compared in detail with those of the original books and of 70 Korean translations published before the murder case, respectively. Findings show that the visual/verbal elements of the book covers are transcreated in a way that accentuates feminism, expands the female readership, or strengthens the emotional bond between author and reader. Specifically, the images and titles emphasise lexis evoking positive feelings, the first-person pronouns identifying the reader as a feminist, images with higher levels of sensory modality (but with lower levels of naturalistic modality), friendly illustrations (rather than actual images), rich colours with higher emotional temperature, typefaces conveying a good mood, and/or social actors encoded as friendly or active women. Many of these multimodal features differ from those of the book covers published before the post-2016 feminist movement.

For successful interpreting, various types of knowledge, abilities and skills are required, which can be summed as interpreting competence. As students start interpreter education, they bring with them a bag of expectations and their own understanding of interpreting competence. Then, their perception of interpreting competence may change in the course of interpreter training and education. The present study aimed at examining students’ understanding of interpreting competence in a longitudinal manner at the start of the training compared to the second year of study at a graduate school of interpretation and translation in Korea. The findings show that students tended to place high importance on most of the interpreting competence elements but the importance ratings were more differentiated in their second year. While the participants’ understanding of interpreting competence became advanced thanks to training and practice, the study also found that more emphasis is needed on delivery and professional ethics.

This study aims to validate the existing research on TED translation strategies which have mainly been conducted using a content analysis method. Two surveys were conducted, one in 2014, and the other in 2019. The survey results show that TED translators also consider audiovisual information when subtitling, and consciously omit repeated information, discourse markers, and pronouns while intentionally keeping transitional words. They also answered that they prefer domestication strategies for sayings, and literal translation for currencies and measurement units. Compared to the 2014 survey, TED translators in 2019 were more actively following experts’ practice of subtitling that are found on TV or in movies: they attempt to follow professional subtitling rules on domestication, punctuation, and subtitle lengths. The respondents described that their translation strategies are mainly centered around the audience’s easy understanding of the messages and information provided by TED talks. The results of the surveys are found to support the presumptions offered in the existing studies: omissions/additions of certain information in accordance with video, differentiated translation strategies for culture-specific terms, omissions of repeated information, discourse markers, and pronouns, and retainment of transitional words were all intentionally done.

The COVID 19 pandemic has affected international conference interpreters with a big blow. As a series of conference has been cancelled and the mode of conference has changed to tele- or video- conference, their working spaces and modes have greatly changed as well. Unlike their counterparts in the U.S. and Europe, where distance interpreting is commonly practiced in the community interpreting, a majority of Korean conference interpreters had to struggle, all of a sudden, to adapt to distance interpreting, going through trials and errors in the past year. This study comprehensively analyzes the concepts and types of distance interpreting as well as previous studies that contain the results of questionnaire surveys of and interviews with interpreters. Based on the analysis, the study identifies types of characteristics of distance interpreting from the perspective of carrying out interpreting, specifically describes difficulties that interpreters face in the field, and ultimately suggests interpreting skills needed in the age of distance interpreting. It is hoped that this study will be used as basic data for interpreters when they prepare their business practice of distance interpreting.

This study attempts to develop a measurement scale of teachers' beliefs in Translation classrooms as we believe they constitute major elements of pedagogy affecting other factors, such as learning, curriculum, and institutional environments in education. We used four major educational philosophies to assess the beliefs: conventionalism, progressivism, reconstructionism, and post-modernism. We surveyed about half of the teachers at a major professional translation and interpreting school located in South Korea and conducted exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses with the reliability and validity duly checked. The exploratory factor analysis identified 47 scale items out of 64 items, which reveal underlying aspects of the teachers' beliefs. A measurement model of teachers' beliefs was developed through the confirmatory factor analysis with 16 scale items that reveal a complex interplay among the four elements of education from the perspective of the teachers. An unexpected conflict among the items was observed, revealing an eclectic nature in the teachers' beliefs that would require delicate coordination for successful educational effects. To understand the whole picture of educational effects, in addition to teachers' beliefs, learners' beliefs and institutional environments need to be further investigated.

As a case study, this paper presents an investigation on gender bias in neural machine translation with Naver Papago and Google Translate. In spite of the remarkable progress in machine translation system, there are remaining challenging tasks, especially the gender bias in machine translation and processing itself. This kind of phenomenon threatens the fairness of a translation system and runs the risk of amplifying biases in machine translation. Under the circumstances, this study examines gender bias in neural machine translation system with Google Translate and Naver Papago. As for the gender bias evaluation in two machine translation, this paper makes English-Korean and Korean-English language sets using a lexicon set of adjectives. Also, this study purposes to compare Naver Papago and Google Translate. Upon the qualitative examination, the findings revealed that Naver Papago and Google Translate are significantly prone to gender-biased translation and biased results against women are much more frequent. Also, Naver Papagoseems to be more abusive against women. On the other hand, Google Translate seems to be more balanced than Naver Papago, using gender-neutral vocabulary and structure. Moreover, Naver papago and Google Translate exhibit a tendency toward male defaults typically associated with unbalanced gender distribution or stereotypes.

This study examines the translations of Paradise Lost translated in South and North Korea. Using Mona Baker’s Narrative Theory and Framing Concept and Kathryn Batchelor’s Paratext Concept as the theoretical basis, this study explores the representation of Satan in the source text and analyzes how its aspects were reframed in the South and North Korean translations’ paratext and main body. It specifically reviews the paratext’s preface and the commentary on the work, and it analyzes Satan’s appearance, action, and speech in the main body. The analysis shows that reframing took place mainly through selective appropriation and labelling during the translation process. In the paratext, the South Korean translation frames Paradise Lost as a Christian poem. The North Korean translation however transforms the source text into a radical political poem and reframes it as a communist narrative. Whereas the South Korean translation tends to weaken the positive narrative of Satan, the North Korean translation strengthens the positive narrative of Satan and relates it to the North Korean political narrative. The transformed Satan in the North Korean translation shares similarities with the role model of an autonomous communist common in the North Korean literature.

Translators are copyright holders by law. The creative nature of translating is recognized in the realm of legislation, internationally and traditionally, by the Bern Convention in 1886 and the Universal Copyright Convention in 1952, and domestically, by Copyright Law, which has been enacted since 1957 in Korea. The Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, the key governmental institution that is in charge of copyright-related affairs, has introduced and enacted standard contract forms to promote fair contract practices especially in the areas that basic professional rights are often elusive even to its legitimate right holders. This article attempts a critical review on the governmental standard contract forms in the field of publishing, firstly, the current 2018 version, and then, the administrative notice version that was released in January 26, 2021. In so doing, it hopes to evoke translators of their rightful professional rights.

Although dialects of a single language could distinctly differ from each other, including their common language, very little is known about interpreters’ comprehensibility of a dialect and the accuracy of interpreting performance of which source language is in the dialect. This paper reports on the findings of an investigation that explored the accuracy of a consecutive interpreting performance from the Jeju dialect that was performed by Jeju dialect speaking interpreters and non-Jeju dialect interpreters. By using a meaning unit-based quality assessment, the accuracy of interpreting performances between the two groups were compared. The results show that the non-Jeju dialect speaking interpreters’ performances were significantly inaccurate with the majority of the information in the source text either being omitted or distorted whereas Jeju dialect speaking interpreters’ performances achieved acceptable accuracy. The incomprehensibility of Jeju dialect seems to be attributed to the inaccurate performances of the non-Jeju dialect speaking interpreters, largely due to unfamiliar words. Although both groups used the same strategy (omissions and making inferences) to cope with incomprehension issues, the effectiveness of the strategies was limited because non-Jeju dialect speaking interpreters were confused by the unique phonetic, morphologic, and lexical features of the dialect.