Earticle

Copyright protection is granted to reward artists and writers for their creative efforts. Therefore, creativity is the very foundation on which copyright is protected. In this age of the fourth industrial revolution, copyright of translated texts is an important issue for both users and developers of machine translation, since they need to secure translation data to enhance machine translation’s quality. Creativity is also important to human translators, as it is what they can differentiate themselves from machine translation. In recognition of such significance of translation’s creativity, this paper analyzes Korean court rulings on translation copyrights to understand how the courts assessed creative qualities of translated texts. The results show that the courts ruled that translated texts are creative, when the texts had substantial similarity with original texts, were produced with mental efforts exerted by translators, and showed creative qualities that were distinctive enough for the translated texts to be generally understood as being new and different from the source texts. Copyright laws have long been criticized in translation studies for treating translation as mere derivatives of original texts with limited originality or creativity. However, the findings of the study show that the Korean courts have applied clear criteria to determine whether translated texts are creative or not.

This paper explores how a professional learning community (PLC) can be used to address pedagogical concerns and help improve both teaching skills and student satisfaction. Translator trainers frequently enter the profession without sufficient pedagogical training, compounding the challenges they face. This is especially true when teaching in institutional settings such as universities where there is little coordination or interaction among trainers. From an institutional point of view, ensuring not only high-quality training but also consistency and uniformity is critical, which points to a need for collaborative efforts on the part of trainers. This paper reports on an attempt to build a PLC of translator trainers within a graduate translator training program. Through three cycles of action research on the PLC that took place over four semesters, the trainers’ needs and concerns were identified and collaboratively addressed. To determine if the initiative had an impact on teaching quality as perceived by the students involved, a statistical analysis of the trainers’ course evaluation scores was conducted at the end of the research. The results and their pedagogical implications are then discussed together with the feasibility of PLCs in the training of translator trainers.

In recent years machine translations have become increasingly sophisticated with artificial intelligence technology. Machine translation services are expected to be actively used in some contexts to increase productivity in the translation process. In this regard, this study aims at revisiting translation competence in the emerging new technological paradigm. If machine translation and computer-assisted translation tools become more widely used, translators will need to know how to adapt to the changing environment. In an attempt to address the issue, first, the changing nature of translation workflow process will be explored. Second, technological competence and post-editing will be examined. Third, future prospects for the translation industry will be discussed.

In the process of interpreting from Korean, an article-less language, to languages with articles such as English, the interpreter needs to determine the definiteness of noun phrases in the source text and employ appropriate articles in the target text, which poses additional linguistic and cognitive challenges to the interpreter. In this study, student interpreters performed consecutive interpreting, and their transcripts were analyzed to examine how they rendered nominal referents from Korean to English in terms of definiteness. Quantitative and qualitative analysis of data show that the participants tended to avoid using articles, whenever possible, in the required contexts and employed other determiners such as possessives and demonstratives. Most of the uses of such determiners were judged either unacceptable or replaceable with articles. Detailed patterns in the interpretation of definiteness from Korean to English and their pedagogical implications are discussed.

Although image plays an integral part of TV news translation, TV image has long been left unexplored in TV news translation studies. In this regard, this study seeks to find image-related translation strategies in TV news. The key finding is that the addition of verbal signs about the camera’s distance of the image is adopted to comply with the redundancy norms of reporting in the Korean media. The addition of the verbal signs about the context before and after the image that is selected in the target text and the deletion of the verbal signs that appear the same on the image are also adopted in order to comply with the length of the report in the Korean media. Furthermore, the addition of the verbal signs about the background information of the image is also adopted as one of key translation strategies to encourage prompt understanding of target viewers.

This study examines the role that narrative voice plays in the aesthetics of modernist and contemporary fiction in English and Korean literature, focusing on the concept of polyphony as a means of reflecting and expressing the interior. The study grew out of the author’s earlier research on translation strategies for Korean first-person narratives and on existing Korean translations of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, which shed light on the larger notion of narrative voice and polyphony in modern fiction and how it should or could be recaptured in translation. This paper offers an analysis of opening passages from a total of 11 novels and stories written in either English or Korean with recognized for their distinctive narrative voice, focusing on narratological techniques including first-person interior monologue and free indirect style. A detailed grammatical analysis of spoken Korean serves as an important basis in the text analysis. The study concludes with a proposal of methods for recognizing and translating voice elements in Korean and English narratives into English and Korean, respectively, by defining the relationships that the literary prose and narratological techniques used in the two languages correspond and interconnect.

Significant progress has been made in machine translation since the introduction of the Neural-based Machine Translation (NMT) algorithms. For Korean-English translation, there is growing evidence that the machine translation engines are rendering more and more acceptable translations with time through deep learning. The progress inevitably raises the question of whether human expertise will eventually be replaced by machines. This question depends on whether and how much of the inter-lingual mediation process depends on inherently human capabilities. To understand the potential boundaries of machines translation, this study draws on the role of cognitive complements in face-to-face communication, focusing on spoken as opposed to the commonly researched written texts. The first part of the study discusses the role of cognitive complements in human communication. Then to illustrate the important role played by cognitive complements in human communication, the second part of the study explains the errors made by NMT from the perspective of cognitive complements, based on a sample text analysis using Google Translate. The analysis indicate that applying the current engine to face-to-face encounters has serious pragmatic risks. From the perspective of machine translation, therefore, the ability to apply cognitive complements like human beings, with the ability to draw on extra-linguistic context may be the key to making NMT ready for real-world applications as far as the processing of spoken texts is concerned. While effort is underway to relate sensory experience to text processing, enormous computing power requirement may be another obstacle before human interpreters can be replaced completely. Pedagogic implications of this study for post-graduate interpreting programs are discussed in the final part of the paper.

The purpose of this study is to seek educational measures for correct punctuation usage in translation by investigating the level of students’ understanding on Russian punctuations and categorizing the types of errors in student translations acquired. A survey was conducted on the students attending A university’s graduate school for translation, and 289 Korean-Russian translation works by students were acquired for qualitative analysis. The results of the survey displayed that a majority of the students had received no formal education on the usage of punctuations and were relying on their intuition when conducing Korean to Russian translations, while receiving no feedback from the instructor. The analysis of the translations showed that when the same punctuation mark served different purposes in Korean and in Russian, error occurred as the Korean grammar rules would be followed (for example, ellipses, parentheses, periods and commas). Secondly, punctuation marks based on Russian syntax incurred the most error (for example, commas and dashes). Thirdly, the punctuation marks that are absent in the Korean grammar structure were rarely utilized and frequently misused (for example, colons and semicolons). Therefore the imperative for the following arises: 1) systematic education on the similarities and differences between the function and usage of Korean and Russian punctuations; 2) explanation of the syntactical characteristics of Russian punctuation and continuous inspection of their correct usage when translating; 3) comprehensive feedback on alternative translations so that the learners to whom the Russian punctuations are unfamiliar can actively utilize them when translating.