Earticle

Since the concept of translation specification was introduced, scholars have proposed types of information that needs to be included in translation specifications but there have been limited efforts to investigate and incorporate in the specifications clients' actual translation needs. To understand clients’ needs, this study analyzes the translation specifications that were written by government institutions in Korea. The results found that Korean government agencies offered information on skopos, audience, subjects, text types and terms of transactions, all of which are commonly proposed by a number of preceding research as essential elements of translation specifications. Furthermore, rather than allowing translators to decide on their own, the clients expressed their preference for certain translation strategies on choice of terminologies and semantic transfer and even for human resource and translation process. To ensure more effective translator-client communication, the existing model of translation specification should incorporate the various needs of clients and be written out in a format that could easily be understood both by translators and clients.

Researchers have reported significant impact of L1 pronunciation on L2 pronunciation among Korean speakers of English for whom English is their second or foreign language. This paper aims to investigate whether this occurs with equal regularity in interpretation students. To the extent that it does occur, we would predict a clear negative effect on the quality of their interpretation, rendering it less comprehensible to the audience. The investigation was designed as follows: In the first part, the authors compared the phonemes as well as the phonetic variants of Korean and English. In addition, the phonotactic constraints of Korean, such as nasal assimilation and 'n' insertion, were discussed. In the second part, the authors gathered 18 students of translation and interpretation, none of whom had lived in an English-speaking country before the critical age. They volunteered to participate in the experiment to improve their delivery in English. For the experiment, they were asked to conduct Korean-into-English sight translation and their pronunciation was analyzed to gauge the influence of L1 pronunciation on their L2 pronunciation. The results offer examples of L1 pronunciation transfer. It can be concluded from the evidence that time should be set aside for dedicated pronunciation training for some interpretation students, since this weakness threatens to interfere with the comprehensibility of their delivery in their L2.

Women’s representation in the movie is often constructed by characters’ language use. This implies that in a subtitled or dubbed movie, translation may affect how women characters are represented in the film. The present study aims to show how subtitling may change women’s representation, and to provide explanatory hypotheses for the shifts in women’s representation. For this purpose, the researcher analyzes Sex and the City 2 (a 2010 American film addressing the 21st New Woman’s perspectives) in a Korean subtitled version, using Gideon Toury’s descriptive method. Findings show that feminist views encoded implicitly in the original film are less apparent or unobservable in the Korean subtitles.

Simultaneous interpretation is a very difficult work that requires listening and remembering of Source Text and articulating of Target Text to be performed simultaneously; therefore, a simultaneous interpreter has to bear cognitive pressure. The more different the language types are, the more difficult it is to translate between those languages with different structural and functional features. Between Korean and Chinese, there certainly exist word order difference of S+O+V and S+V+O, the length of modifier that is placed in front of the modificand, hypotactic logic combination structure, and paratactic logic combination structure. Accordingly, without going through an intensive training at the regular curriculum, simultaneously interpreting Korean into Chinese properly is nearly impossible. To overcome the difficulty, this paper suggests turning Chinese sentences into ‘open texture.’ By minimizing Korean sense unit, converting into Chinese construction, such as V+O or S+V, and then arranging the words, naturalness of Chinese sentences and simultaneity of simultaneous interpretation are both guaranteed; thus, effectiveness of simultaneous interpretation is expected to improve.

This paper explores the functions and features of netizen translations as well as their implications from the perspectives of 'collective intelligence' and 'reverse agenda-setting' which are considered the most salient characteristics of Web 2.0. The study reveals that netizens’ translations serve as a starting point for discussion and expansion of knowledge and as an indispensable part of integrating different types of information. Netizens engage in translation activities in a simultaneous and immediate manner. They are generous toward machine-translated, low-quality translations by other netizens and do not question whether the source texts are genuine. The study also shows that netizens’ translations or their translation activities have been covered by major mass media. However, the coverage is mostly concentrated in the sports and entertainment areas. These findings shed light on the possible role segregation between professional translators and netizens and the areas the academia and professional translator's need to educate netizens on.

This is a follow-up study of Chung (2014) on interpreters’ memory. On the basis of her observation, Chung (2014) maintained that interpreters tend to retain linguistic forms (numbers, proper names, etc.) better than non-interpreters, only if these are embedded in context. We administered a text memory task to four groups of different interpreting experience and ages (professional interpreters, school teachers, interpreter trainees, undergraduate students) in order to put this hypothesis to the test. Not only in retrieving the linguistic forms but also in remembering the context around them, expert interpreters as well as interpreter trainees yielded the best results (statistically significant). Both groups were good at dividing (or switching) their attention into (or between) linguistic form and meaning so that they were able to keep both sets of information safely. School teachers who had a comparable educational background and experience with texts as expert interpreters sometimes showed even poorer results than student groups. It might owe to the fact that interpreters had a well-developed attention system, because interpreting, in nature, requires a multitasking ability. Age, on the other hand, seems to have played only a subordinate role. Expert interpreters, the second oldest group did well throughout the test, whereas the undergraduate students often yielded the poorest results.

This study aims to explore the possibility of using translation logs as an effective means to facilitate a two-way communication between instructors and translation trainees, who aspire to become professional translators, in the process-centered learning environment. Translation logs herein refer to a written record of problems and inquiries that occur during the translation process, solutions for those problems, and the reasoning behind the decisions made by trainees. To this end, this study presents a case where the author used translation logs as a tool to make up for shortcomings of written feedback provided by teachers on students’ assignments. It also demonstrates the possibility that translation logs enable instructors to give trainees individually-tailored feedback and also facilitate an interactive communication between instructor and student. In order to prove educational implications of the use of translation logs, this study analyzed the written reports submitted by student translators by dividing their entries into five categories.

It is difficult to discuss narrative structure in the texts of German writer W. G. Sebald (1944-2001), because he tries to deconstruct conventional narrative theories. This means that his writings tend to reject traditional narratology, whilst he prefers the collection of fragmentary memories and facts out of different resources rather than a traditional storytelling according to deliberate plots. In terms of translation, narrative structure in Sebald’s texts causes therefore plenty of problems with regards to tense, mode, viewpoint etc.: In his extremely long sentences, for example, which go almost beyond the limit of German grammar and approach to the impossibility of translation, various narrators who are often unimportant, anonymous, and already forgotten like in oral history, appear in a single sentence. As a result, translator takes part in searching for unidentified narrators and finding out their own voices as well as their stories which had disappeared and been erased in history. In this aspect, translator could contribute not only to literary criticism, as Marilyn Gaddis Rose argues, but also to cultural intervention and cultural criticism as well, whilst he could (re-)interpret their narratives based on his re-reading and re-writing.

The study suggests elements of thoughts on foreign language development aimed at (future) translators and interpreters from the specific case of French language teaching. After emphasizing the importance of a preliminary work with the students focusing on the imagery of language and the reality of learning needs, the study suggests possible avenues for teaching based on the effects of discourse and various linguistic achievements. A particular emphasis is placed on the benefits and importance of using the literary corpus in language courses and linking it with other types of speeches and texts. The study is thoroughly supported by various examples, and the last argument, in particular, describes more precisely two cases of teaching activities aimed at translators and interpreters respectively.