Earticle

The prevailing wisdom dictates that a translator should work into his/her own language (L1). In Korea, however, the prevailing wisdom does not match the reality. With the demand for into-English translations burgeoning, Korea is faced with a problem: Because few English speakers take up Korean language studies, and even fewer go on to become translators, only a handful of foreigners are working in the K-E translation market, and those are mainly literary translators. To make matters worse, very few Korean-speaking translators can produce high-quality English texts independently. They must rely on native-speakers to check and revise their work. Given Korea’s unique situation in which Koreans must translate Korean into English, the translator and reviewer should work as a collaborative team to produce high-quality English translations. The paper will review prior research, look at findings of the study and then establish a methodology that translators and revisers can follow to produce a quality L2 product.

Interpreting live TV coverage of a major event such as the war on Iraq during the first part of 2003 was a major challenge for broadcast interpreters. To get the real time information accurately and quickly to the Japanese audience watching Japanese TV, the interpreters were required to interpret news that was broadcast by foreign TV for foreign viewers. In the caseof the war on Iraq, English-Japanese interpreters were mobilized in great numbers to promptly convey real-time information originally broadcast by foreign media for foreign viewers as part of the news broadcast by Japanese TV stations for the Japanese audience. Promptness and accuracy of information were the most important points called for by the viewers. But in the case of live TV coverage of the war to be interpreted into Japanese, the interpreters are caught in the middle of how to interpret the foreign news geared towards foreign audiences in the most intelligible manner to the Japanese audience. There are issues of terminology specific to war that interpreters need to know, plus differences in the reporting viewpoints by various original TV stations that interpreters need to be aware of in order to choose the most pertinent words for interpretation. This article will look into how the actual interpretation process was conducted in the interpretation of live TV coverage of the war in Iraq for Japanese TV, and it makes concluding remarks and suggestions as to what would be the best way to proceed in the case of such a major event to be interpreted live on TV.

This study attempts to propose pedagogical methods for conference interpreters through the extensive investigation on components of cognitive processes of interpretation with an emphasis on memory, attention, and automaticity. Studies on bilingual acquisition research were also reviewed to better understand the psycholinguistic characteristics involved in conference interpretation. It was argued that comprehensive understanding of the cognitive processes underlying interpretation is prerequisite to prepare pedagogical methods for prospective interpreters. Theoretical foundations should be explored in conjunction with important cognitive processes. Pedagogical approaches to conference interpreter training should be geared to theoretical tenets gleaned from other related disciplines. Finally, several principles and detailed educational methods for interpreter training were suggested.

The study attempts to investigate a relatively unexplored area in translation with specific reference to the dynamics between translation and gender as a sociolinguistic concept. The first part of the study is devoted to presenting a brief theoretical survey of main issues raised with regard to the relationships gender holds as a sociolinguistic variable. The second part of the study attempts to further explore the theme through an empirical model of research. A brief set of research tasks were constructed in such a manner that a given translator has to make a potentially gender-sensitive reconstruction of meaning in what are called ‘subjective’ and ‘objective’ response areas. The results regarding the subjective response area indicated that male respondents showed a consistently greater tendency to adopt gender-marked translations as opposed to their female counterparts. The results regarding the objective and more conscious response area, on the other hand, indicated that many of the male respondents who previously made more intuitive choices of gender-marked translations, in fact, shifted toward gender-unmarked translations. It is concluded that the identity and value systems of a translator seem to have a significant implication on the process of reconstructing meaning in translation.

This paper is aimed at analyzing and discussing problems associated with current methods used in translating Korean tourist information web sties into English. For this purpose, the author investigated tourist information web sites run by municipal governemnts both in Korea and in English-speaking countries. The data obtained from this investigation was compared side by side to reveal differences in the way Korean and English websites offer information. Then, the author looked into how these differences were handled in English versions of the Korean web sites investigated. The results show that major differences exist between Korean and English web sites in style of language, mode of information offering and organization of web pages. The English versions of the Korean web sites tended to transfer Korean features into English. Finally, the author offers some thoughts on these problems from a perspective of functional translation theory, including suggestions on how the differences observed can be effectively resolved in order to fulfill the function of translated texts more successfully.

In interpretation, the converted version should be able to cause the same reaction from the audience as the speaker intended with his original speech. To that end, transforming the sense of a language into the corresponding linguistic units of another language must be done at the deep structure level, not at a surface level. Most interpreters are well aware of this fact, in principle, but they are not free from occasional word for word translation. To explore the cause of this phenomenon, this study divided college students into two groups and showed English movie clip to both groups. One of the group’s clip did not have subtitles while the other group’s clip had Korean subtitles. Comprehension was accessed by a twenty-item fill-in-the-blank test. The results showed that students in the experimental group with Korean subtitles retrieved English words more easily than students in the non-subtitle group. In the experimental group itself, literally translated Korean subtitles brought higher scores than Korean subtitles transformed at the deep structure. This indirectly demonstrates that converting words at surface level requires less information processing capacity than the processing at deep structure level. This explains, in part, why interpreters sometimes end up with literal translation in their simultaneous interpretation. The extreme multi-processing under time pressure might be responsible for this.

The curriculum and instruction of graduate schools of interpretation and translation are to a great extent similar. The curriculum consists of courses allowing students to practice the skills of interpretation and translation while the instruction involves their actual practice. The purpose of this article is to see whether models of teaching pertaining to educational theories can be applied to the teaching of interpretation. Though most of the models introduced by Joyce & Weil are basically aimed at K-12 students, some of them can be adjusted to the instruction of interpretation in order to accommodate the different learning styles of students. A brief look at the Tyler Rationale as it applies to curricula for interpretation schools will set the groundwork for the objective of such schools, followed by various educational models. The teaching models chosen for this paper are advance organizers, memorization, non- directive teaching, role-playing, simulations, followed by an overview of learning styles and multiple intelligence.

It is said that Japanese-Korean translation is easier than other language combination. However, the closeness of two languages often results in translationese phenomena, which could affect the reduction of the readability of TT. This paper aims to find out how professional translators are sensitive to the interference and translationese problems through his/her translating process. Also, we could get the implication about the relation of translationese phenomena and readability too, by using TAPs (Think-Aloud Protocols) and readability test. TAPs is thought to be the only method to investigate the process of the translating and the translators’ ‘black box’. The result of the test is that whether translators are aware the possibility of the interference and their mother tongue abilities affect the readability of TT. We found that Japanese-Korean translation have the problems of interference and translationese phenomenon, which could reduce the readers’ readabilities.

The author’s intended message is embedded in the words and expressions of a text, and is communicated to the reader. In response, the reader mobilizes as much knowledge he/she can under given circumstances and reasons out the message the author produced. And, thus, themessage is fully understood. As such, through the act of communication, the reader is able to understand the connotative meaning because he/she shares with the author certain information or knowledge accumulated in the memory. Therefore, the more knowledge the author and reader share, the better the reader understands and author’s intended message. Often times, the translator is doomed to anguish over how he/she should reexpress into target language the sociocultural knowledge(presupposition) that a society shares. In particular, how should one translate the underlying message in a sentence or context, which the reader of the source text understands using the knowledge he/she shares with the author? This paper defines translation as an act of communication through which the translator searches for equivalence, and specifies on how to translate presupposition or sociocultural knowledge, ingrained in the source text.

This paper aims at demonstrating how the Interpretive Theory can be applied to giving feedback to the student when teaching interpretation in the classroom and further extending such interpretive approach to practicing outside the classroom. To that end, it briefly reviews the Interpretive Theory and presents the interpretive feedback model that serves as a yardstick. This approach enables not only the teacher to give positive feedback in the classroom but also the students to find out why the interpretation went wrong by evaluating their colleagues or themselves outside the classroom, thereby identifying their weaknesses on their own or through the help of their study partners. The rationale for this study as well as the characteristics of the interpretive feedback model are also discussed.

This paper emphasizes the importance of basing teaching for future interpreters on findings that have been made on interpretation; techniques in accurate listening, effective note taking, etc. In the context of the “Theory of Sense”, this paper elaborates on the training of basic techniques such as accurate listening, effective note taking in consecutive interpreting, correct use of cognitive complements, clear expression of ideas, transcoding where applicable. The paper further explores strategies for training more progressed trainees; dealing with narrative, argumentive, descriptive and rhetorical speeches; interpreting into a B language and retour interpretation; and training in simultaneous interpreting. This paper particularly stresses that the interpreter’s understanding of a speaker’s intended meaning forms the core of all interpreting activities.