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This article investigates the public perception of simultaneous interpreters on social media, namely comments on YouTube and QnA from Naver's Knowledge In (KiN), the largest online Q&A community in South Korea. Co-occurrence analysis and LDA topic modeling were performed on the collected and pre-processed datasets from these sources. The co-occurrence analysis of Naver KiN found the word 'professional' in all clusters of the corpus, confirming a degree of public acceptance of simultaneous interpretation as a professional feat. The word 'professional' showed the most frequent co-occurrence with 'certification'. Co-occurrence analysis of YouTube comments found recurring references to interpreters' skill, passion, personality, and appearance. Interpreters were perceived to have 'elegance', 'grace', 'humility', and 'dignity'. Through this study, we found that the public expects simultaneous interpretation to be a professional practice, even as it is understood through a lens of oversimplification and ambiguity.

With the popular uptake of ChatGPT, the interpreter community is set to undergo significant changes in its discussion and directions on topics related to machine translation. This study investigates the features and differences of ChatGPT, a natural language processing (NLP) tool, in comparison to Google Translate’s translation engine, specifically between the Korean and Japanese language pair, with the purpose of exploring means to leverage ChatGPT’s capabilities in the context of interpreter training in said pair. For this purpose, we will first analyze ChatGPT’s translation of idioms and proverbs to identify whether it is capable of paraphrasing polysemous connotations and implications. We will next analyze ChatGPT’s ability to translate unstructured colloquial utterances. Finally, we will analyze whether ChatGPT’s translation output displays translation universals such as simplification and clarification. Based on these analyses, this study will discuss how ChatGPT may be used toward interpreter training.

This study interviewed instructors teaching the classes integrating Computer-Assisted Translation (CAT) and other language technologies at graduate-level translation programs in Korea and compared the curriculum content with those at foreign universities reported in previous studies, and found the following: First, graduate courses in Korea and abroad similarly begin with an introduction of relevant theories and concepts to raise the students' awareness of language technologies and enhance their motivation. Second, major topics covered in those courses in Korea and abroad include terminology management, translation memory utilization, collaborative translation using CAT tools, and post-editing. However, while overseas courses offered training in both CAT tools and post-editing, only two participants in this study, albeit all of whom taught CAT tools, included post-editing in their classes. Third, unlike the findings from previous overseas studies, none of the participants in this study included in their classes controlled language, evaluation of machine-translated texts, or translation engine training. Graduate-level translation programs are encouraged to consider incorporating such topics, given the recent advancements in neural and generative machine translation engines. This will not only help improve efficiency of professional translators-to-be, but also expand and diversify their future scope of work as professionals.

This paper aims to identify the essential aspects of quality assurance (QA) in institutional legal translation, with the goal of establishing a more organized QA model for relevant institutions in Korea. The first section of this paper examines ISO 20771:2020, a recently implemented international standard for legal translation, and compares it with ISO 17100:2015, the standard for institutional translation services. The subsequent section explores the actual QA practices and recent developments observed in the Directorate-General for Translation (DGT) and the Court of Justice of European Union (CJEU), seeking inspiration for Korean legal translation institutions. The findings reveal three key QA levels: workflow management, human resources, and tools, which are systematically integrated within the EU translating institutions to ensure a streamlined and consistent QA approach. Lastly, the paper revisits the current workflow prescribed in the rules for creating Korean versions of international trade agreements in light of the ISO standard, and suggests compliance with the identified QA principles.

Translation Studies doctoral students at graduate schools of translation and interpretation generally lack research experience prior to undertaking doctoral studies because the general focus of their master’s degree in Translation Studies was toward developing practical translation and interpreting skills. As a result, they are often required to develop and train key research competencies concurrently to their doctoral coursework. One such research competence is in academic writing, essential to presenting a doctoral dissertation and disseminating their research findings. Such a key research competence is deserving of academic support and training to develop. This paper presents a case study of a specially designed doctoral course that aimed to develop academic writing ability based on a collaborative writing class model. The workshop style course led students through the process of preparation, drafting, and revision through peer feedback and teacher feedback. This paper discusses the training experiences in a reflective manner and argues that such collaborative writing process can effectively raise students’ awareness about effective academic writing and enhance their academic writing abilities.

Among the numerous points of cultural tension between Korea and China, controversies over Korea’s traditional festival Dano and traditional food Kimchi have been notably salient. On the topic of this controversy, this study found that while the two nation’s shared used of Chinese characters and history of Confucian culture have resulted in some useful linguistic and cultural similarities and analogues, they may in fact be a cause of disadvantage in translating cultural terminologies. That is, these similarities may cause misunderstanding when translators fall into the trap of pseudo-equivalent words (faux amis) or when they are unaware of cultural differences. Against the theoretical background of B. Brecht’s epic theater and alienation effect, this study suggests perspectives and strategies for the translation of cultural terminologies that objectively perceives and respects cultural differences between the two countries. This study also proposes specific translation strategies according to the type of cultural terminology, giving more weight to the adequacy of source texts than the acceptability of target texts; to the fidelity to ST than to the readability of TT in translating Korean-Chinese cultural terminologies. Above all, this study emphasizes the vital importance of translators’ sensitivities to cultural differences and deep understanding of the two cultures.

Machine translation (MT) output falls short of human translation (HT) in terms of accuracy and readability, despite continued technological advances in its field. Against this backdrop, significant attention has recently been directed toward machine translation post-editing (MTPE), where a text pre-translated by an MT engine is post-edited by a human translator to meet client needs. In this study, a text translated from English to Korean via MT was post-edited, and the post-edited output was analyzed to identify any errors that were not properly corrected. The accuracy of the post-editing process was then quantitatively analyzed against HT of the same text. The HT group was found to spend approximately 1.5 times more time on average compared to the MTPE group. The post-editing accuracy, i.e., the ratio of corrected errors to the total number of errors, tended to increase as more time was spent on the task. The average post-editing accuracy of the MTPE group was 39.6%, significantly lower than the translation accuracy of the HT group at 73.6%. This suggests that even trained individuals find it challenging to thoroughly identify and correct accuracy errors in densely packed, machine-translated technical texts.

This study aims to provide a general understanding of how undergraduate students perceive various facets of ChatGPT and its use as a translation tool. For this purpose, empirical data were collected in two stages in May 2023 at a university in Seoul. In the first stage, students from an English-Korean translation department completed a questionnaire on their perceptions of ChatGPT, their user experience, and ethical challenges associated with AI tools. In the second stage, 49 students from two intact classes (course title: Computer-Aided Translation) translated a short op-ed article into English using ChatGPT (ver. 3.5) as both a translation and post-editing tool. Following this task, they wrote reflective commentaries on their on-task behavior and post-editing procedures. This study reveals various findings, including students’ frequent use of simple prompts and their negative perceptions of translations generated by ChatGPT.

The purpose of this study is to examine strategies in Chinese to Korean metaphor translation, centered on conceptual metaphors in political literature. This seeks to determine whether the translation helps readers to reach optimal relevance. 362 metaphors were collected from political news articles published by Xinhuanet.com and People's Daily Online between January and May 2023 with the use of the MIP metaphor recognition algorithm. Based on these collected metaphors, this study conducts a quantitative analysis of the different types of metaphors and metaphor translation techniques, as well as a relevance theory-based evaluation on the efficiency of these techniques. The findings of the study are outlined as follows: Six translation techniques, including "retaining metaphor", "explaining metaphor," "retaining metaphor + explanation," "substituting metaphor," "omitting metaphor," and "adding metaphor," are employed when translating metaphors in political news in China and South Korea. This study examines the efficiency of metaphor translation techniques based on relevance theory and concludes that "maintenance" is the best metaphor translation technique to attain the optimal level of relevance when the original readers and the target readers have similar backgrounds and cultural experiences. The perfect equivalence between the original readers and the targ et readers is challenging to attain from the context effect standpoi nt, making it impossible for "metaphorical interpretation" to achieve optimal relevance. Translation tactic for domestication texts include the two translation techniques of "replacement" and "addition." This procedure, while efficient, also allows the target readers to quickly understand meaning and visual representation in metaphor. "Omission" drops the original metaphor, which may overlook or alter the meaning, image and information contained in metaphor, hence, we should pay more attention to it.