Earticle

This study analyzes the Japanese translation of Han Kang’s Human Acts, focusing not on shifts in grammatical person per se but on the narrative voice constructed through person choice and its ethical effects. While analytically distinguishing narrator and focalization, the study adopts voice as its central concept and examines how person choices in each chapter position the reader. The analysis shows that the novel consistently employs narrator invisibility while carefully modulating narrative voice through choices of person. In Chapters 1 and 5, second-person pronouns refer to specific characters, yet the narrating subject remains unresolved, suspending reader identification and maintaining ethical distance. After the explicit appearance of Jeongdae’s spirit as a first-person narrator in Chapter 2, these configurations invite retroactive interpretation, but the text deliberately resists fixing the narrator. The Japanese translation renders this structure visible through socially and pragmatically marked pronouns such as kimi, boku, watashi, anata, kāchan, and omae. This study argues that translation here functions as an ethical mode of communication, positioning the reader as a reflective subject engaged with memory and responsibility rather than emotional identification.

Building on Song Yo-in’s discussion of “cross-cultural opacity,” this essay reconceptualizes the translation of culture-bound terms as a site where equivalence is not given in advance but negotiated through translator judgment. The essay is organized into four parts. The first part revisits Song’s triad of transliteration, definition, and analytical redistribution, and suggests that translation practice relies on a far broader range of strategies, including hybrid procedures, paratextual glossing, substitution, and omission. The second part challenges Song’s inbound/outbound distinction by introducing factors overlooked in his framework, such as translator idiolect, intratextual variation, and diachronic revision. The third part examines Song’s notion of emotive meaning, demonstrating that culture-bound terms often operate as carriers of evaluative and affective force and that preserving emotive meanings may require departures from strict denotational fidelity. The last part examines Song’s discussion of idiomaticization to show that cultural lexemes embedded in idioms no longer function as discrete cultural markers and therefore call for discourse-level interpretive solutions. In light of these four dimensions, the study positions Song’s theorization as a productive resource for contemporary debates on cultural translation and translator agency.

This study aims to analyze police interpreters’ note-taking patterns, methods, and their correlation with interpreting accuracy. Data were collected from 12 Russian-speaking police interpreters, including interpreting outputs and corresponding note-taking samples. The analysis yielded the following findings. First, the amount of note-taking varied by source language. Interpreters tended to take more notes when working from their native language, though individual approaches varied greatly. Some produced structured, consistent notes, while others recorded selectively based on personal judgment. Second, interpreters’ choice of note-taking language depended on the source language. When working from Korean, interpreters preferred using Korean in their notes, reflecting efficiency in notation. When interpreting from Russian, they used both Korean and Russian, suggesting an effort to balance efficiency with cognitive processing. Third, a negative correlation was found between note-taking rate and omission rate across both language directions. Although not statistically significant, this suggests that more active note-taking may contribute to improved accuracy.