KJC Korea
Journal Central

This study examines the case study method in translation studies in terms of the ways in which the method may be used to enhance our understanding of the complex inner workings of translation. Although case studies of translations and translators, as well as source texts and translation events, are fairly prevalent in translation studies, this method remains an under-researched topic within the discipline. Case studies are often praised for their ability to provide detailed and in-depth knowledge of cases but criticised for their inability to generalize research findings. This paper starts out by exploring the concept of “empirical” in the context of translation research and the status and role of the case studies method as a subtype of empirical research method (cf. Williams and Chesterman 2002). Although “empiricism” in translation studies has often been approached narrowly in positivist terms, researchers are increasingly taking diverse opinions regarding the nature of empirical data and method. Based on this perspective, the study argues that the value of the case study method lies in tracking complex processes and linking complicated causes and outcomes. Case studies plays a key role in providing a detailed understanding of causal mechanisms in translation events and showing the complicated ways in which translation- related concepts and theories are sensitive to contexts.

Translators do not take neutral position in translating foreign language news because they are embedded in the ‘public narratives’ held by the society or the country which they belong to. Public narratives surrounding political or military confrontations could be extremely varied depending on the positions they take. The Korea-U.S. Free Trade Agreement is a pertinent example of a negotiation between two parties who are divided over terms and conditions of the contract in pursuing their future economic interest. The examination of Korea-U.S. FTA news translations in this paper reveals how the news texts are adopted and manipulated in accordance with public narratives of Korean society. Adopting ‘localization’ to explain various strategies used in news translation is relatively new methodology. The prerequisite required here is that news is commercial product of media companies. Compared with ‘domestication’ and ‘trans-editing’, localization puts more weight on distribution and accommodation. Foreign news pertinently adopted and manipulated in accordance with the public narratives of target society would have better chance to be broadly consumed.

Translation is not an innocent and transparent process taking place between two parties with equal power and common interests. In most cases, there are ideological gap, conflict of interests, and differences in value system. Because narratives are the best means to understand and make sense of the social world around us, by reframing narratives in the text, translators adjust the ideological gap or differences in values and interests in translation. Drawing on the narrative and framing theories proposed by social scientists, this paper sets out to explore how narratives are reframed in translation process. For the analysis of texts, 34 sets of CNN news articles and their Korean translation on the issue of “Arab Spring”, the revolutionary movements which have swept across the Arab world since the start of 2011, are chosen. It is an ideologically charged topic where American diplomatic and political interests are quite different from those of other nations around the world including Korea. Conservative Arab policy centered around the American interests, close diplomatic ties with Israel and autocratic Arab nations such as Egypt and Saudi Arabia, and importance of oil reserves in this region put the US in quite a difficult situation when pro-American autocratic leaders such as Mubarak and Gaddafi were ousted by the civil revolution. Thus, it was assumed that the narratives in the source text would be changed in the target text through reframing. The analysis found three new frames appeared in the target text: “dictators”, “bloody crackdown”, and “pro-democracy movement.” In the source text, the original frames were “longtime Arab leaders”, “clash between the police and protestors”, and “uprising.” By adding a new frame or replacing an existing frame with a new one, translators “suppress, accentuate, or elaborate particular aspects in a narrative encoded in the source text”(Baker 2006: 114). The main narrative in the source text was “Arab people protested against their longtime rulers. There was a clash between riot police and protesters.” Through reframing of narratives, it was changed into “Arab people staged pro-democratic movements against dictators. Bloody crackdown of riot police on protestors triggered more violence.” This kind of narrative changes in translation are reflecting the different interests and perspective between the two countries and constructing different perspectives for people.

Since they were first introduced in the 1980s, picture book translations have dramatically increased in Korea. A significant number of translations has been from English and Japanese. The translations from these two languages reveal a difference in the translation of proper names, particularly names of characters. This paper delves into this phenomenon, investigates the reasons for the difference, and attempts to put it into perspective. In Japanese-Korean picture book translations, the character names are often changed into Korean names whereas in English-Korean translations original names are retained. The former reflects adult ideology in picture book translations: an aversion to Japanese names by Korean adults, and their view on whether ST-oriented or TT-oriented names are better for children. After Japanese colonial rule of Korea ended in 1945, extensive efforts were made to eliminate traces of the Japanese language from Korean. This avoidance of Japanese names in Korean translations can be viewed as a residue of such efforts. An alternate reason for the name-changing of characters in Japanese-Korean translations is the deemed familiarity of young Korean readers with Korean names. Nevertheless, this practice is gradually shifting towards the preserving of original Japanese names in translated picture books. Quantity and quality enhancement in both authentic and translated picture books in Korea, call for cultural diversity in Korean children’s literature translations, and rapid multiculturalization in the Korean society all lead towards more ST-oriented translation of character names in picture books.

Simultaneous interpretation (SI) requires various cognitive efforts to be made all at once, such as listening, comprehension, target discourse production, short-term memory, and coordination. It can be performed successfully when the interpreter’s capacity exceeds the capacity required for the process. Many factors affect how much capacity the interpreter can exploit and how much is required at any given moment during SI. Source text (ST) is obviously one of such factors, and therefore, this study aims to understand its characteristics. Grasping the various traits of ST can help the interpreters to better anticipate what is coming, and hence, to better manage the cognitive load demanded during the SI process. The data consisted of 100 questions posed by audiences at various conferences. An analysis of their forms and contents shows that questions from the audience share some common traits. Discourse markers such as interrogatives and/or interrogative final endings can often be misleading, as the discourse function itself is not to ask a question, but to counter-argue, blame, and/or save face. When the discourse function is purely to ask a question, the question frequently comes in the form of request or statement. This finding also reveals characteristics of spoken language, such as the use of unfit conjunction, repetition, and use of personalized collocations and expressions. All these traits of ST can hamper the interpreter’s comprehension in the SI process. However, understanding them can help the interpreters, especially student or novice interpreters, to correctly anticipate what is coming and to implement an effective strategies to manage the SI process early on.

Specialized translators usually have the continuum of information needs in translation process, ranging from lexical or terminological to stylistic or encyclopedic information. Legal translators are in need of a variety of documentary resources to meet these information needs because the complexity and speciality of legal texts require considerable legal knowledge as well as linguistic competence. European translators commonly use corpora in legal translation process as documentary resources, along with other translation software including CAT tools and term tools. Corpus-based approach in legal translation is found especially useful in complementing and validating dictionaries and thus reducing arbitrary decisions of translators. However, Korean legal translators are allowed very limited access to legal corpora compared to European counterparts because they are excluded from, or are included in relatively small samples, in bilingual comparable corpora. Against this backdrop, this article built DIY corpus (ad hoc corpus) consisting of United States Code with AntConc software and applied such corpus in analyzing English translations of causative verbs in Korean statutes. DIY corpus revealed that causatives make/require/cause are more frequently used in United States Code than English translations of Korean statutes. Also, concordancing with have/let/make/require/cause showed delicately different legal meanings and usages which cannot be ascertained with general or legal dictionaries or thesauri.

This paper aims to describe and analyze the premises and conditions for writing the history of Translations Studies in Korea. We have proceeded with our work in two steps. First, we have examined the constituting factors of the Translation Studies as academic discipline, the founding history and the institutionalization of the Western Translation Studies. After a brief look at the situation of Translation Studies in China and Japan, we have discussed the origin and the starting process of the ‘Beonyeokhak’, name of Translation Studies in Korea. We have tried also to describe the successive stages of the development of the Beonyeokhak and we have finished our work by proposing the four tasks of the Korean Translation Studies.

This article attempts to explain the function of ‘the’ in the context of Christian literature translation so as to later open up the systematic and comprehensive discussions on the related area. The translation phenomenon on question seems to need more detailed descriptions about the referential functions of ‘the’ than it generally requires. This paper therefore revisits existing views on the translation of ‘the’ into Korean and tries to extract necessary understandings for the question until the satisfying explanation finally arrives, which is the exophoric function of ‘the.’ Another back-bone of this research lies on the premise that Christian literature (published books in this case) is tightly inter-woven with the Bible, which means that it serves as the body of the extra-textual knowledge where the exophoric ‘the’ in Christian literature can retrieve its exact referent. In this course of discussion, this article brings out an attention to the easily-unnoticed micro-structure of ‘the’ in the process of into-Korean translation. Also it spotlights the exophoric function of ‘the,’ which has usually been left out from the discussions of cohesive devices within texts. Yet, concerning contributions of the paper, the most emphasis should be made on the fact that it peeps into the uncharted realm of Christian literature translation, using ‘the’, one of the smallest fractions of text, as a communicative clue.

This paper looks into problems experienced by English-Korean interpreters as they interpret from World Englishes - in this case Indian English - into Korean. A simultaneous interpretation experiment was conducted on 10 interpreters, followed by retrospective think-aloud procedures. The study aims to identify the segmental and suprasegmental problems Korean interpreters find difficult to solve as they perform simultaneous interpretation. The study results revealed that suprasegmental elements imposed the greatest problems on simultaneous interpretation process. Difficulty in capturing the phonological elements resulted in poor intelligibility, thereby undermining interpreters’ comprehensibility on the source text meaning. Unintelligible suprasegmental elements of Indian English included lexical stress (or pitch stress) in wrong syllables, sentence stress in function words, monotonous intonation, and lack of pauses. The syllable-timed language feature of Indian English put particular difficulty on interpreters’ listening phase. Segmental elements were also found to be contributing to low intelligibility of Indian english, albeit to a lesser degree, compared to suprasegmental elements. Interpreters responded to unintelligible elements by omitting, substituting, summarizing, generalizing ST segments in the production phase, which eventually undermined the fidelity to the source text.

This paper aims at evaluating the use of punctuation in Korean-Chinese translated texts of news headline based on the Chinese comparable corpus, and presenting useful strategies of punctuation in Korean-Chinese translation that can be employed in Korean-Chinese news headline translation. To this end, 10,000 of the morph-tagged news headline comparable corpus were built, and compared with original 10,000 news headlines. As a result, the punctuations in translated texts(TT) occur 2.6 times more frequent than that in original texts(OT). Significant differences were observed by calculating G2 value on frequencies of punctuations, on the following nine types of punctuations: comma(逗号,，), pause(顿号, 、), semicolon(分号，;), colon(冒号，:), parenthese(括号，()), dash(破折号, —), ellipsis(省略号, ……), hyphen(連接号, -), middle point(間隔号,⋅). And this is due to interference from the Korean source text and lack of knowledge about function and distribution of punctuation in TT. Furthermore, effective translation strategies and discussions on how such strategies can be deployed and what attention should be paid in the process of translation. The author hopes the research will contribute to offering guidelines for those in the news headline translation profession.