KJC Korea
Journal Central

This paper draws on the concept of “frames” (Goffman 1974) to explore how interpreting is represented in news discourse. Based on an analysis of articles containing the word thongyek [interpret/interpreting/interpretation], gathered from three major Korean news institutions, the Hankyoreh, the Chosun Ilbo, and Yonhap News, during the period from January 1, 2009 to December 31, 2009, the study identifies and categorizes the frames that structure the discourse on interpreting. The analysis of articles reveals that the discourse on interpreting is organized in terms of four frames: “communication frame”, “profit-making frame”, “multicultural support frame”, and “professional frame”. The findings suggest that the people’s views on interpreting, reflected in the four frames, are closely associated with the media discourse on major social, political and economic issues in the Korean society.

This paper purports to answer two questions. First, what are the functions of dash and julpyo (form-equivalent punctuation mark in Korean) and how do they differ? Second, what strategies can be used to translate dash in English-Korean translation? As for the first question, this paper illustrates how the punctuation marks take on the functional role as unique linguistic entities. Following the analysis, this research compares the two punctuation marks, so as to find the implications for translation. As for the second question, this paper classifies strategies to translate dash and discusses how such strategies can be deployed and what attentions should be paid. It is of notable interest that punctuation marks in English-Korean translation often invite ‘headaches’ and that the issue has been neglected in the academic discipline of translation studies, which calls for the need to address the above research questions.

In this study, the author has tried to elucidate both different and similar features between Korean and English translation by comparing their stylistics of two translated versions of L’odyssée d’une fille by Maupassant. The results discussed in the paper are as follows :First, it could be safely argued that both Korean and English translated versions were first hand translations, i.e. they were translated directly from the original text. Their titles and publication dates support this line of reasoning. Second, analyzed from the viewpoint of comparative stylistics, the Korean translated text shows an even rate of direct and indirect translation technique, while the English translated text has overwhelming distribution of direct translation technique. Third, even though he adopted the literal translation strategy, the Korean translator Sowol frequently added some phrases or expressions, if need be, for the purpose of explicitation. The author has named it as a word-to-word translation with the explicitation effect. Fourth, the modulation procedure showed the various aspects of its target at which the translator tried to change; viewpoint, sentential unit, time expression, mood, personal reference. Fifth, the Korean translated text revealed the domestication strategy of cultural elements, while the English translated text showed no related translation strategy to speak of. This could help Korean readers at that time, who were stranger to Western way of living and institutions, become familiar with them and minimize their cultural shock.

This paper aims at analysing the difference of formality between translated texts and non-translated texts. Formality is a typical property of written language in contrast with spoken language. This paper compared formality in translated texts with that in non-translated texts, examining usage of colloquial style and literary style for French-Korean translated literary texts and Korean literary texts. French-Korean translated texts reveal a stronger formality than non-translated texts: the frequency of literary style in the former is higher than that in the latter despite the fact that the former have a higher rate of dialogue than the latter in our comparable corpus. An examination of the frequency in use of words that are used differently in colloquial and literary styles reveals that words of literary style are used more frequently in French-Korean translated texts than in non-translated texts. At the syntax level, the ellipsis of postposition and the length of sentence structure were investigated. The frequency of postposition in French-Korean translated texts is higher than that in non-translated texts, the length of sentence is longer in the former than the latter, and the long type of negative expression appears more frequently in the former than the latter. At both the lexical level and the syntax level, French-Korean translated texts have more properties of literary style than non-translated texts and thus French-Korean translated texts are more formal than non-translated texts.

This paper proposes to apply various Translation Quality Assessment models to translation teaching in consideration of the importance of assesment. Translation assessment has been an area of heated debate and controversy due to its subjective, incoherent and unsystematic nature. Despite these shortcomings, translation assessment plays a pivotal role in the process of learning and teaching translation. Accordingly, familiarizing both students and teachers with various TQA models is in dire need. For students, TQA models could raise students’ awareness of the yardstick they are evaluated against in the near future, help students acquire systematic assessment skills, and teach them to effectively defend themselves in case of disagreement over how to define translation errors. TQA models are also conducive to teaching translation on the part of instructors. Various models could expose students to clients’ diverse perspectives at various levels, enabling teachers to avoid insisting upon their particular criteria. In addition, TQA models can be employed to effectively address students’ weaknesses with the specified categories. For these reasons, this paper proposes various TQA models be actively explored and applied in translation classroom for both students and teachers.

This study aims to explore mutual knowledge shared with TL readers and its impact on subtitling of cultural references. For this study diverse cultural references were collected from ten sample movies produced in the 1980’s and the 2000’s, and diverse translational approaches based on Baker(1992)’s strategies were employed in order to see how mutual knowledge affects translational decisions and to identify proper translational approaches to subtitling, which may or should be different from those employed for the written texts. The analysis reveals that mutual knowledge, or more precisely, translators’ perception on mutual knowledge shared with TL readers affects their decisions on how to translate cultural references.

This study uses K. Reiss’s text typology as a theoretical framework for an undergraduate translation course that could serve as the basis of other translation courses. While Reiss initially categorized the texts into “informative,” “operative,” “expressive,” and “multi-medial,” the author designed such a course in a manner that reflects an additional type, namely “mixed form.”In building the skeleton of the course, the author determined the sequence of the five text types and the kinds of text variants in consideration of the learners’ competence and other relevant factors. Then he offered the course for 34 students during the first semester of 2010 in a way that emphasizes cooperative learning. During and after the course, the author made evaluations using three different types of methodologies. First, he observed the class to assess the extent to which the students understand and use Reiss’s text typology. Second, he looked into the students’ translation commentaries and presentation materials to provide a glimpse of how they apply the theory to their practice. Third, he conducted a questionnaire survey to seek the students’ opinions about the effectiveness and acceptability of the course.

This paper attempts an investigation into the substances of what self-translation is and raises a question whether the theories and criterion of other-translation quality assessment and criticism can be literally applied to the case of self-translation. Based on the analysis of author-translator, Ahn, Junghyo’s Silver Stallion: A Novel of Korea, some striking translation strategies and aspects are revealed in whole texts like ellipses, deletion, addition, rearrangement of sentences and paragraphs, explicitation, implicitation, specification, simplification and others. These features couple directly with the unfaithfulness of source text and author, and with the unqualified translator in other-translation. But the unlimited autonomy of author-translators’ has to be acknowledged in terms of its own innateness of writing and self-translation. It has the reasons why self-translation can be defined as follows: 1)it is ‘bilingual writing’ which approaches in the area of translation and creative writing simultaneously; 2)it has ‘the stronger motivation of writing’ than that of translation; 3)both source and target texts of author-translator’s should be accepted and consulted as independent and complement ones to apprehend them properly; and 4)‘a new writing style’ including the comprehensive concepts of rewriting and bilingual writing. Therefore it is required to look at the features of self-translation from bilingual writing or rewriting perspectives. And also the establishment of theories and criterion of self-translation quality assessment and criticism are required and applied.

Every translation learner has done a rudimentary form of translation all too often in the course of learning a foreign language. This form of classroom exercise, or what we call “grammar translation” has been used by foreign language students for understanding and learning the “non-contextualized” meanings of foreign language words and grammatical constructions of foreign language sentences. The coarse translations produced in the classroom were mainly and ultimately for the language learner’s understanding of the message, but not for retransmitting it as a TL text sender to another group of readers. This is how translation essentially differs from a mere mechanical code-switching and how translation curricula should be differentiated from foreign language curricula. Based on the observation that translation-oriented analysis is different from “reading comprehension” practiced in foreign language classrooms, this article discusses the importance of analysis both as the first phase in translating process and as the methodological starting point of translation pedagogy. In addition, Newmark’s points of analysis are specifically referred to and several more points deemed important in analytical reading are considered.

Using Gérard Genette’s Seuils (Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation) as a theoretical starting point, this paper aims to show the inadequacy of his concept of paratext in translation studies, and to investigate the importance of its interpretations for explaining the cultural complexity within a single community and between communities. We therefore analyzed the paratexts in Korean and English translations of Madame Bovary, a French novel written by Gustave Flaubert. In case of the Korean translations of this novel, we examined the chronological alterations and problems of their paratexts in the social contexts of Korea. Analyzing the paratexts in English translations of Madame Bovary, we also explored the differences of paratexts between Korean versions and English versions. In conclusion, we proposed to define the significance of paratext studies in translation as follows: the paratext in translation is a possible criterion for the choice of translated texts and the translation assessment; and its study makes possible the cultural and social considerations in one single cultural area, and comparative considerations between different cultural areas.

We could make the results translated by a machine translation system natural if we make an implicit translation competence of professional translator explicit and apply it to the machine translation system. The lexical translation pattern can be taken as the explicit translation competence of professional translator. The purpose of this paper is to describe semi-automatic construction and semantic classification of the lexical translation patterns that make the machine translation results natural. The lexical translation patterns can be built semi-automatically by two ways. One is to extract automatically the idiomatic expressions of source language from bilingual corpus and construct the lexical translation pattern manually. The other way is to construct manually the lexical translation pattern by comparing the translation result of professional translator with the result translated by machine translation system. We are able to classify the lexical translation patterns into two semantic groups. One group is related to the idiomatic lexical translation patterns. The other group contains the lexical translation patterns with non-animate subject phrase, quantifier phrase, passive phrase, and verb-derived noun phrase.