Earticle

This article examines the influential Presbyterian missionary translator James Scarth Gale (1863-1937) and explores how his religious views and the social context of his mission influenced his translation practice. It also considers factors of reception, such as how his awareness of the potential readership may have influenced his translation practice. Of his many literary translations, this study focuses on Korean Folk Tales: Imps, Ghost, and Fairies, published in 1913, and “The Life of the Buddha,” completed in 1915. Drawing on the notion of translation stylistics and relying on archival research, it explores how Gale modulated and consolidated Korean folk beliefs and Buddhist concepts through a Christian lens, based on a comparative analysis of source texts and translations. It argues that Gale’s conceptual equation of indigenous beliefs with Christianity had significant implications for Korea missionary activities and Korean literature.

P’ansori is a genre of Korean music that deals with epic storytelling and that dates from the eighteenth century. It was designated a National Intangible Cultural Property in 1964 and inscribed on UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2008. Despite its stature as a national cultural symbol, however, p’ansori has not been a major research topic in translation studies. Against this background, the present study analyzes ch’ang 唱 (song) in Marshall R. Pihl’s “The Song of Shim Ch’ŏng” (Sim Ch’ŏng ka 沈淸 歌) – one of the few English translations of a full p’ansori work – and shows how p’ansori can be enriched in translation. Specifically, I analyze the prosodic and stylistic features of ch’ang passages in the following areas: segmenting hemistichs for balanced rhythm, making vague phrases more singable, adjusting idiomatic expressions, establishing formal correspondence between the original and translated texts, trimming previous translations, incorporating a master singer’s version, and providing visual clues. This study concludes with a brief discussion of findings, limitations, and implications.

This article explores the extent to which textual slips, particularly typographical mistakes, featured in the source text have largely been ignored in translation criticism. This has tended to gloss over the possibility of the source text being corrupted, i.e., featuring genuine mistakes, thus producing mistranslations. Citing English (mis)translations of some renowned Korean poems, the article argues that translation criticism and assessment should pay more attention not only to the translated text but also to the typographical mistakes in the original text as a serious subject of research. A meticulous textual criticism must precede any serious translation, and this principle is undoubtedly applicable to literary translation as well as to technical translation.

Translation is not just linguistic transfer, but also a process of political writing; there is often an unequal power relationship between two languages, dominant and marginal. From this political perspective, I examine Deborah Smith’s English translation of the Korean novel Human Acts by Han Kang. I argue that her translation challenges the perceived universality of Western knowledge and acknowledges the multiplicity of experience, culture, and knowledge of the Korean people in a decolonizing translation. The translator’s work, in what Lawrence Venuti calls foreignization,1 rejects the hierarchy between two cultures and the supremacy of English in a variety of ways. She respects Korean language, culture, and history as significant elements in her translation by retaining and explaining culture-specific terms, and by adding Korean history to the paratextual material and the actual text of the translation. Smith attempts to resist the oppression of cultural imperialism, not allowing Korean cultural otherness to be appropriated by Anglo- American culture.

This paper examines the dynamics of competition and cooperation between Korea and Japan in constructing the Seoul-Pusan railway during the late 19th century. Korea and Japan had quite different motivations in the construction of the railway with each trying to secure its own agenda and interests on the Korean Peninsula. For the Korean government, the construction was perceived as a critical modernization project and an important symbol of advancement. For the Japanese government, the Seoul-Pusan railway was an important bridgehead to expand Japanese influence on the Asian continent. Initially, the Korean government, wary of the Japanese, hoped to grant concessions to almost anyone but the Japanese. Although the Korean government finally agreed to grant the Seoul-Pusan railway concession to a Japanese syndicate, it retained the right to buy back the railway company. Although in the end, the railway served Japanese colonial interests in attaining and maintaining control over Korea and beyond, the processes that characterized the construction of the railway reveal the deeply complex and paradoxical nature of colonial modernity by showing that the colonized can still retain considerable agency.

Park Soo Keun (朴壽根 Pak Sugŭn, 1914-1965) was a modern artist active in Korea from the later Japanese colonial period of the early 1930s to the mid- 1960s. Despite the poverty and adversity it caused him, Park persisted in producing paintings of ordinary people, including the poor, that he observed in his everyday life. His use of local color and the distinctive textures of his multilayered oil pigments led to his posthumous recognition by Korean critics and American art collectors as one of the most “Korean” artists. Park’s paintings often present women as the main subjects. His interest in the rediscovery and restoration of Sin Saimdang 申師任堂 (1504-1551), who emerged in the 1960s as a significant female icon with the traits of a wise mother, talented artist, and learned noblewoman, is epitomized in his visual depiction of female figures. Park’s silent, serious representations of Korean mothers, symbolizing suffering and self-sacrifice for the sake of the country’s next generation, evoke nationalistic sentiments, admiration, memories, and nostalgia. Through investigating the construction and representation of such a Korean female identity in the social and cultural context of Park’s time, this study elucidates the current enthusiastic reception of Park’s paintings in Korea and the growing international recognition of a distinctive Korean style in studies of modern Korean art.