Earticle

According to English poet Sir Philip Sidney’s well-known Apology, poetry is meant to instruct and delight. In the spirit of this assertion, our ongoing experiments algorithmically detect patterns in vernacular Korean poetic texts and manifest them creatively in digital environments. Our aspiration is to deepen the discussion of vernacular Korean poetry by enabling engagements with Korean poetic texts that privilege image over discourse, if only temporarily. The aim is to see, quite literally, what Korean poems can be in order to deepen discussions of what they are or might mean. This project extends the authors’ previous work by attempting to visualize an entire book of poetry in immersive space as a forest rather than envisioning individual poems as two-dimensional trees. Taking liberties with the theme of the conference where this work was presented for the first time, sensibility and landscape in Korean literature and film, we explore Korean literature as landscape. The performative/deformative processes of computing described here include programmatic morphological linguistic analysis and L-Systems procedural modeling. Specifically, we map the bibliographic and linguistic codes of Kim So-wŏl’s canonical Chindallaekkot (Azaleas, 1925) into three-dimensional digital space to create interactive paintings from Kim So-wŏl’s “speaking pictures,” to borrow again from Sidney. This is done by expressing linguistic elements in Kim’s poems (nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs) and their structural bibliographic elements (stanzas, lines, white spaces) in the grammar of L-systems in order to create commands that (re)render Kim’s poems visually as trees.

This study is an attempt to identify the textual norms of news trans-editing, which involves a combination of translation and editing processes. Starting from the discussion of the theories of translation norms and the need for research in this relatively new area, the paper examines a set of the New York Times articles(ST) and their trans-edited versions(TT) selected through modified constructed sampling, with the aim of discovering the textual norms that govern news trans-editing. The paper finds that the articles trans-edited in Korean generally follow the norms commonly operating in news translation, but diverge from it in the structuring of the text and the way the main ideas are presented: translation shifts occurred in more than half of the headlines and all leads, and translation strategies including addition, deletion, change in the order of paragraphs and summarizing were used to better suit the needs of the target readers, to produce rhetorical effects, or to deliver the trans-editor’s subjective opinions. The degree and aspects of trans-editors’ subjective intervention as well as the meta-discourse structure which characterizes the given text’s identity as a (translated) news story suggest that the textual norms of local news-writing may operate in the news trans-editing. Drawing on the findings of the textual analysis, the paper concludes that news trans-editing may have its own translation norms, which cannot be subjected to the conventional adequacy-acceptability criteria.