Earticle

The Hallyu advance to Russia at the beginning would have focused on movies, dramas and songs, but recently the types of exported contents such as games and cartoons, etc. are diversifying. Among them, the animation successfully entered the European and Chinese markets, attracting attention as a new Hallyu content. In the case of animation, it is a field where expectations and interest are concentrated the more in that it involves various economic added value creation such as advertising and toys, etc., beyond the spread and diffusion of Korean culture. In the Russian animation market as well, which has been centered on American animation so far, the Korean animation has successfully entered the market in recent years, and achieved a great popularity. In Russia, not only the overseas animation industry, but also the domestic animation industry has been showing highly successful promotion, and the overall potential of the animation industry is as much highly appreciated. As in other countries, Korean animation, which is exported to Russia, is child animation, and most of them are early childhood animation. The reason why Korean early childhood animation is so popular not only in Russia but also worldwide is because of its ability to produce high-quality 3D animations, with familiar and easy-to-understand themes, diverse characters, and bright coloring, etc. However, the fact that Korean animation pursued world universality rather than specificity of some Korean is also considered as a major factor of its success. Thus, this study attempts to examine whether the universality is also implemented in the translation focusing on Korean early childhood animation which entered Russia, and if then, what the specific methods and strategies are in the translation. At the same time, this study attempts to investigate what the losses and limitations of universality implementation are. Also, this study will discuss what the translator's role is and what it means in this process.

Nowadays it is not uncommon to find the term “Korean wave” in the literary field. The craze for K-Pop has increased global attention to Korean literature and language, which led to a surge in the translation of Korean literary works. Han Kang’s The Vegetarian, which was translated and published in over thirty countries, is a typical example of “Hallyu” in literature. In contrast to this recent phenomenon, Korean literature in the early twentieth century was just starting to build up its foundation. During this period of time, Korean authors tried to find their own identity by absorbing various literary works from other countries, especially those of Western nations such as France, Russia, etc. Needless to say, the urge to learn from the Western literature and nourish Korean literature involved translating the literary works in different languages into the modern Korean language. Thus, at the beginning of the twentieth century, translation of Western literature came into vogue in the Korean literary world. In this presentation, we would like to address early translations of works of Balzac in colonial Korea. We would begin our presentation by looking into precedent studies on the history of the translation of western literature into Korean language, one of which dates back to as early as the 1970s. However, when we take a closer look at these researches, we could find out that many of them lack certain accuracy, particularly those which concern translated works of individual authors. In the case of Balzac, critical errors are found in the bibliography of the author’s works translated into Korean. Therefore, gathering all the existing documents and correcting their mistakes would be the first step of our presentation. Next step of our presentation is to examine each of the Korean translations of Balzac’s novels. Since Balzac’s name became known to Korean readers in 1921, three works of Balzac were translated into Korean during the colonial times. The first translation, Une Passion dans le desert (A Passion in the Desert), was published in Gaebyeok magazine in 1922. Even though several Japanese translations of the same novel were already published, the Korean translator, Byeon Youngro, voluntarily chose to retranslate an English translation. The second translation of Balzac’s work, Eugénie Grandet, was printed in the daily newspaper, Chosun Ilbo, in 1929. Shimhyang- san-in was the translator, yet it was a simple summary of the novel rather than a translation. The last translation, during the colonial period, of Balzac’s works was Le catéchisme social (The Social Catechism). The translation of Le Catéchisme social, which was left out in the bibliography of precedent studies, was published in September 1935 in Sahaegongron magazine. Through a detailed examination of the translated works of Balzac, we would be able to understand the perspective of Korean readers of the era on the author and find out the reason these particular translations could come into the world.

As the Korean Wave “flows well” into every corner of the world, translation, which used to be defined only as a process of translating words or text from one language into another, now needs to be redefined as cultural “channel”, helping the transfer of one culture to another. In this regard, we will examine the role of translation as a kind of “waterway” in the process of accepting a country’s culture in other countries, with a focus on the French writer Maupassant translated in Korea, especially after Liberation. Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893) is one of the most widely translated writers in Korea from the early modern times — his first Korean translation, Le pain maudit was translated by Jin Hak- Mun in 1917 — to the present. His commercial popularity, however, has led to an excessive number of translations, which lack translation ethics and self-censorship, and as a result, they have formed an irreversible, literary prejudice in Korea that Maupassant’s works are sentimental, slushy and fit for female readers. We will have a close look at how this stereotype has developed through translation, with two examples: Une Vie (1883), Pierre et Jean (1888). Both were translated into melodramatic and problematic Korean titles; for instance, the first has been translated as A woman’s lifetime, and the second as A foggy image of a mother (1959), Mother’s secret (1974), and Mother’s lover (1993). The Korean translations of these two novels are great examples to demonstrate that the translation has an important role as a “channel” in terms of accepting foreign culture, including language and literature.

Antoine Berman was a French translator and thinker of translation who studied deep into the subject of translation criticism, which is not devoted to the methodology for evaluation of the works in a negative way, but to the form of “productive criticism.” The schema of his translation criticism is suggested in Pour une critique des traductions: John Donne (1995, published posthumously). In this schema, an analyst treats the translation as the original text and the latter as the former, and figure out the “textual zones” where the literary work reaches its innate aim. By analyzing these problematic textual zones and making an attempt at the criticism, the analyst is able to examine the minute patterns of mark lingered on the field, where two or more language cultures are mixed, and permeate each other. The purpose of this study is to propose an example of the translation criticism by referring to the schema, which Berman did not present in a definite method but as a blueprint. The object of the analysis is “La Végétarienne”, a French version of the short story of Han Kang translated by Jeong Eun-Jin and Jacques Batilliot.

This paper aims to examine the value of Beckett’s translation by analyzing the English translation of “Zone”, a poem written by Guillaume Apollinaire, done by Samuel Beckett. It used the translation analysis methodology proposed by Antoine Berman in Pour une critique des traductions: John Donne (1994), and analyzed Beckett’s translation particularly from the perspective of poetics (poéticité). The analysis shows that Beckett’s translation was clearly affected by modernism, which underscored an individual translator’s independence. His translation was done in unique manners: he would change modes of expressions to keep the verse rhyme with each other, use poetry techniques for translation, and imply meanings in words. Nevertheless, the genuine value of his translation is how it is based on the “texture” of Apollinaire’s poem. While in the poem appears a human body in fragments, such as head, neck, hands and legs, Beckett used phrases containing body part terms, such as ‘at hand’, ‘go to one’s heart’ to highlight the body broken into pieces, thereby creating an effect that maximizes the limits of the reality faced by the poet. As seen above, Beckett’s translation established its own place as a distinctive work which reveals a different side of the poem.