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This study compares the English and Japanese translations of The Vegetarian (Part I) by Han Kang, focusing on how translation strategies differ according to high-context and low-context cultural frameworks. The analysis centers on three scenes—Yeong-hye’s physical description, her husband’s self-characterization, and the “Dreams of murder” passage—to identify how each translation negotiates cultural and interpretive shifts. In the English version, the translator employs a range of explicitation strategies to accommodate low-context readers, manifested in four main types: explicitation with deletion, judgmental insertion, mistranslation, and addition. These strategies often restructure the original’s implicit tone, emotional ambiguity, and narrative restraint into clarified and interpretively guided expressions, leading to semantic and stylistic shifts. In contrast, the Japanese translation demonstrates high fidelity, preserving the original’s indirectness, lexical nuance, and affective texture in line with high-context communication norms. This comparative analysis shows that literary translation is not merely linguistic transfer but a culturally embedded act of interpretive reconstruction. The study concludes by emphasizing the pedagogical implications of training translators to recognize contextual asymmetries, navigate the ethical boundaries of interpretation, and maintain the tonal integrity of high-context narratives.

This study compares the post-editing processes of professional legal translators and translation students using DeepL-generated translations of Korean-to-English legislative texts. Screen recordings were analyzed for editing time, frequency, search behavior, and editing behavior. The findings indicate that while total editing time was similar for both professional and student groups, professionals performed more edits within the same time frame, demonstrating higher efficiency. Search frequency did not differ significantly between the groups; however, professionals used more diverse and strategic search methods, includingmixed-language queries and advanced operators. Both groupsmade substitutionsmore frequently than other types of edits. Nonetheless, professionals showed greater variation in insertions and deletions and engagedmore frequently in non-editing actions, such as reviewing the source text. Their search and editing behaviors were alsomore closely interconnected than those of students. Despite the limited scope of this study, the results revealedmeaningful qualitative differences in post-editing practices between professionals and students, highlighting the need for targeted post-editing training—particularly in search and editing strategies—to help students develop post-editing competencies.

This study explores gender neutrality in AI-based machine translation (MT), focusing on the translation of the Korean third-person singular gender-neutral expression “그 애” (that person) into English by three widely-used AI-based translation models: GPT-4o, Gemini 2.5 Flash, and DeepL. Using a parallel corpus extracted from the Korean novel Concerning My Daughter (Kim Hye-jin, 2017), the analysis compares AI-generated translations with human translations under conditions lacking contextual gender cues. Results indicate significant differences in gender marking strategies among models. GPT-4o and DeepL frequently added gender-specific pronouns (e.g., “she,” “he”) absent from the original text, while Gemini preserved gender neutrality but utilized overly formal and unnatural expressions (e.g., “that person”) for literary contexts. Additionally, human translators maintained neutrality through diverse strategies, including proper nouns. This research highlights critical ethical issues in AI-based MT regarding gender bias and suggests future research to enhance translation quality and gender neutrality in creative texts.

John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress is one of the most widely read Christian texts after the Bible and has been translated into more than 200 languages, yet it remains underexplored in the field of translation studies. This lack of attention is particularly evident within Korean translation scholarship, despite the existence of numerous Korean versions published over more than 130 years (exceptions include Bae 2014; Choi 2024). As an early attempt to examine multiple Korean translations, this study compares and analyzes the Korean renderings of character and place names in the allegorical novel. The primary data set consists of one source text—the 2008 Penguin Classics edition—and 12 target texts. The analysis reveals a strong influence of Chinese characters on the translation of the book’s title, as well as on the names of characters and places, particularly in early versions. Three of the 12 translations—those published in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and at pivotal moments in the history of the Korean language—appear to have had a formative impact on subsequent translations.

This study explores the stylistic characteristics of literary translation using distant reading methods, focusing on two Korean translations of Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. By dividing the translations into ten segments and applying POS tagging, the study analyzes lexico-syntactic features such as lexical distribution, lexical diversity, and average sentence length. As a more distant reading, statistical tools such as correspondence analysis (CA) and document similarity are applied to examine stylistic consistency and divergence between translators. The findings demonstrate that each translator maintains a distinct stylistic cluster, with varying degrees of lexical density and cohesion, particularly during climactic segments of the narrative. These results correspond to the translators’ stated intentions and paratextual commentary, suggesting that stylistic choices in translation are not only reflective of individual voice but also strategically aligned with the narrative arc. This study illustrates the potential of distant reading as a robust method for translation stylistics and suggests new directions for empirical translation criticism.

As the first part of a series of papers, this paper serves as a preparatory stage for presenting the literariness criticism model. It has three main purposes: first, to shed light on the fact that the translation of a literary work is also a literary work itself and that literariness should be its evaluation criterion; second, to clarify what constitutes criticizable literariness; third, to establish the system of literariness criticism criteria. So far, the literary translation criticism has primarily focused on identifying translation errors and failures by comparing the source text with the target text. In other words, translation of a literary work is often treated as a mere copy―a subordinate version―of the original. This situation is directly connected to the current state of literary translation criticism. To overcome this issue, this paper proposes the concept of criticizable literariness and presents the system of the literariness criticism criteria based on that concept.