Earticle

Yi Ch'ŏngjun (1939-2008) occupies an important place in contemporary Korean literature. He has been canonized in his native country, with his complete works already made available by two different publishers. He is also one of the most translated Korean authors in France. The present study analyzes the French translations of Yi’s oeuvre in order to help map the introduction of Korean literature in France and to explore its “horizon of expectations.” It was found that 31 works by Yi were translated into French between 1966 and 2014 (three novels, two novellas, and 26 short stories). A shift analysis of the translations reveals a large number of interventions by translators and editors, including changes in paragraphing, spaces added or removed between paragraphs, inversion of phrases and paragraphs, changes of discourse, and deletion of cultural elements. The problem with such mediation is that it can modify the aesthetic effect of a work. Rather than labelling these translations as being unethical, it is advised that they be placed in the history of Korean literature’s reception in France. Nevertheless, because “the experience of the foreign” can evolve according to social, cultural, and historical contexts, retranslation of Yi’s works is necessary.

This case study looks into the perceptions and preferences of graduate students of interpretation and translation for online learning. Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, many offline classes had to be suddenly shifted to online classes. The purpose of this case study is to investigate students’ perceptions and preferences for online and offline classes in this unprecedented situation. A survey was developed focusing on three areas: 1) changes in perceptions and preferences for online classes, 2) perceptions on achievement in online and offline classes, and 3) suggestions for the improvement of online classes. The survey results show that students overall preferred offline classes to online classes and perceived that their performance improved more in offline classes. Also, students suggested that guidelines for online classes should be necessary if the pandemic situations persist in the future. It was also pointed that class design, changes in pedagogy, and mastery of the online equipment will greatly affect the quality of the online teaching and learning. This study reveals that development of a new pedagogy for online classes on interpretation and translation is needed in preparation for an era of worldwide pandemics.

This study attempts to examine Korea’s translation culture and main focus by looking at the translation history of Russian literature. The elites who had studied in Japan during the Japanese Colonial Era, introduced the works by Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, and Chekhov and promoted the translation of Russian literature. Afterwards, the Russian literature that was introduced only in Japanese or English translation came to establish a strong internal foundation as professionally educated and trained translators of Russian literature began to translate the original works into Korean. After the reestablishment of diplomatic relations with the Russians in the 1990s, the translation of Russian literature became active. The second-generation Russian literature scholars who had studied abroad translated the 19th and 20th century Russian literary works vigorously and showed outstanding quality translations. The third-generation Russian literature scholars who were trained after the restoration of the diplomatic relations participated in active exchange with the locals and began to widen the scope through the translation of popular literary works. What lies ahead of us is a very important task regarding Russian literature translation. Systematic and methodical translation work must be established so that the Russian literature can not only continue to have an outstanding readability, just the way the writers of the past initiated, but also come to possess an appeal for the general readers. Furthermore, such a system must not just result in the simple translation of foreign works of literature but become a foundation for literary advancement as it exerts its own influence on the works of the domestic literary writers. For such system to be established, there must be a close and intimate exchange among the translators, the publishers, and the literary circles, in which a big picture can be drawn. The group must grasp the overall flow and make a correct diagnosis so that the influential literary translation can take place. A diverse course of translation should be vigorously sought after and must include the works of representative writers of each generation, the works consisting of a contemporary phenomenon that can introduce new literary trends, and the works for the public’s amusement and enlightenment.

Dual-subject construction―which is found in the language of Korean law―is one of the unique features of the topic-prominent Korean language. The first subject in a dual-subject sentence in Korean source texts is often the sentence topic. This paper presents an examination of dual-subject sentences in the Criminal Act, Administrative Procedure Act, Foreign Investment Promotion Act and Civil Act and considers how the two subjects, N1 and N2, were translated into English. First, we identified 41 dual-subject phrases from 38 sentences in the four Korean statutes and analyzed them according to Yang (1989). Second, we examined how the dual subjects were translated into English based on Chae’s (2010) categorization of translation types of dual subjects. Our analysis indicated that in English translations, either N1 or N2 of the source text served as the subject. When N1 of the Korean source text was translated into a subject in English, N2 of the source text played various roles either as an object, complement, component of a verbal phrase or a prepositional phrase. N2 also worked as an adjective phrase, serving to describe N1, the subject. Conversely, when N2 became a subject in the English translations, N1 tended to be omitted in the translated dual-subject clauses. In this study, we identified seven types of English translations of dual-subject sentences of Korean statutes, including two types that were not found in Chae’s (2010) work. The findings suggest that given the different and diverse roles of N1 and N2, despite their seemingly subject-like features, translators need to determine the semantic relationship of N1 and N2 when translating dual-subject statutes into English.

In recent years, Korean webtoons have been gaining popularity in overseas markets. Accordingly, Naver webtoon, the biggest webtoon platform in Korea, have begun to translate webtoons into various languages. In terms of Chinese translation, two versions are provided for readers in mainland China and Taiwan respectively. This study categorizes the linguistic differences: some words and phrases differ from each other; mainland China uses simplified characters whereas traditional characters are used in Taiwan; a number of sentence-final particles are tend to be used in Taiwan; the ‘-er(儿)’ suffix more often attaches to words in mainland China. Based on these different linguistic features, this paper investigates the translation localization of webtoons by comparing Chinese translation versions of the websites ‘Dongman’ and ‘Line Webtoon’ in mainland China and Taiwan respectively. This study suggests five characteristics of localized webtoon translation. First, some words used differently in everyday dialogues were translated by reflecting cultural differences between mainland China and Taiwan. Second, phonetic symbols of Taiwan were used in translations exclusively. Third, the retroflex suffix expressions were used in the mainland Chinese translation, simply adding ‘er’ onto the end of the original word. Fourth, onomatopoeia and mimetic words were translated differently. Fifth, in terms of translating slangs and profanity expressions, pinyin romanization and regional dialect expressions were used in mainland China and Taiwan respectively.

With the rapid rise in foreign investors in Korea’s stock market, more and more publicly-traded companies in Korea publish translated sustainability reports, a relatively new and less studied genre that now replaces annual reports under the integrated reporting standard. As thorough understanding of genre features in target culture counts the most in translating corporate reporting genre, this study carries out a move analysis to explore intercultural differences between Korean and US management forewords, the most widely read subgenre. A systematic move analysis for this purpose requires representative and comparable corpus building and a proper analysis framework. To ensure that, DOW30-listed and KTOP30-listed firms were selected to build comparable and parallel corpora that are coded under the author’s move analysis framework using UAM. The results indicate statistically significant intercultural differences in time orientation, letter format, and corporate philosophy, all of which pose an important question about the role of translators in mediating between cultures.

There was a big technical progress in the research field of machine translation: the main approach has switched from statistical machine translation (SMT) to neural machine translation (NMT), leading to dramatic improvements in translation quality. Recently, another progress has been taking place from recurrent neural network(RNN)-based NMT to transformer-based NMT (T-NMT). As the performance of NMT has evolved, a lot of research papers for machine translation have been published in the field of interpretation and translation. Their main focus is on whether machine translation can replace human translation, and analyzing the quality of translation results. In this paper, we briefly explain the history of the machine translation research and review the mechanism of NMT. NMT is basically composed of three parts: encoder, attention mechanism, and decoder. Further we discuss the new transformer structure based on the encoder-decoder model. We also discuss the challenges in NMT and explain the research direction or solutions to the problems. Particular attention is given to the mistranslation of NMT, quality of the translation, and robustness against the noises in the training dataset as well as in the testing sentences. In order to test the performance of transformer-based NMT, we used the Google NMT (GNMT) service for 4 languages – Korean, English, German, and Japanese. We confirmed the robustness against sentences with noises. However, we found unexpected volatility of NMT models where the input sentence is semantically and syntactically correct, resulting in critical degradation of translation quality.