KJC Korea
Journal Central

This paper addresses the quality of Korean-English legal and patent translation outputs by a commercial neural machine translation engine customized for legal and patent translations. The current research is based on both automatic and human evaluations of Otran’s English translations of Korean statutes and Korean titles of invention and abstracts extracted from patent gazettes. In automatic evaluation, both BLEU and METEOR scores revealed that legal translation outperformed patent translation. Human evaluation results confirmed the automatic evaluation results, showing Otran’s legal translation receiving better evaluation than its patent translation. According to the error comments provided by evaluators, terminology and other errors, mostly stylistic issues, were the most prevalent error types in the legal translation, while terminology and syntax errors were the most frequent in the patent translation. In the legal translation, accuracy and fluency errors were far scarcer than in the patent translation. The results suggest that the domain-specific NMT engine needs improvement in handling terminology in both legal and patent translation, and its legal translation output proved to be good enough for gisting. The findings from this case study cannot be generalized and thus call for further research.

In the era of multilingual law making and law enforcement, legal translation conducted in institutions at national, international and supranational levels has been at the core of legal translation studies over the past decade. This study investigates the concept, scope and quality indicators of institutional legal translation with special attention on improving its quality in Korean settings. Based on the academic literature and the European Commission’s Translation Quality Guidelines, this study identifies three key quality indicators or parameters, i.e. accuracy, consistency and clarity, with prioritized, fit-for-purpose rules depending on the legal status, communicative purpose, recipient, and text type of the translation. In order to apply such indicators with necessary modifications to Korean institutions, this study presents the genre taxonomies of institutional legal translation in Korea and suggests key indicators and the priority of their application in the case of authentic and non-authentic translation produced by Korean institutions.

In recent years, machine translation post-editing has gained much popularity not only in translator training programs and courses but also in EFL classes. The majority of previous studies, however, largely focused on the impact of machine translation (MT) on L2 writing. Building upon the theories and practices of pedagogical application of MT, and by adopting the concept of translanguaging that legitimises learners’ deployment of full linguistic repertoire including L1, this study explores Korean EFL learners’ perceptions of MT and frequent errors in English-into-Korean post-editing. According to the results of a survey and students’ self-reports of their experience with MT, the use of MT in EFL learning was perceived by the learners as an innovative and positive learning experience. The learners highly appreciated the use of MT in their reading practice and post-editing by pointing out that the use of MT reduces stress and increases motivation to learn English. This study also reveals that post-editing practice can help learners understand deficiencies in free online MT output and raise their awareness of the linguistic structure and subtleties of language.

This study aims to investigate how undergraduate trainee translators interpret guidelines for Chinese-to-Korean machine translation post-editing. To this end, 15 undergraduate trainee translators were asked to perform Chinese-to-Korean machine translation post-editing with two different types of text (a report and a speech). The machine translation engine used was NAVER Papago. After that, retrospective interviews were conducted with four students who had written commentaries on their own translations. Results show that some explanations of syntax and punctuation needed to be omitted, while some explanations of lexis needed to be revised to the level that students can understand. It was also found that students needed not only theoretical descriptions of editing criteria but examples of how the criteria can be applied in practice. It was thus necessary to add specific and detailed examples to items that students felt confused, such as style and consistency.

With the expansion of the licensed musical market in Korea, there is a growing need for musical translators. Musical translation requires knowledge about musical production and interaction with musical producers including actors, let alone general translation ability, and, therefore, isolated classroom teaching is inadequate. This study aims to apply a project-based learning (PBL) methodology where students majoring in translation participate in a musical production as translators, identify the effects of the project, and develop guidelines for project-based musical translation education. Six students translated the script and score-book of Little Women, which was to be performed by the musical department of a university. After 12 weeks’ translation project implemented in cooperation with the musical production team, this study found that the project was effective in developing translators’ translation ability and knowledge about musical production. Translation guidelines were developed for both musical producers and translators by addressing the shortcomings identified during the project. These guidelines are expected to facilitate effective and efficient musical translation or help create a PBL setting in musical translation classrooms, thus contributing to fostering capable musical translators with on-site knowledge.

Hemingway’s literary style is characterized by flat, dry, and journalistic prose. In addition, he did not directly present the interpretation of the expressions used in his works to the reader. Instead, he enabled the readers to infer the implicatures of the expressions through their own understanding of the context and knowledge about the world. Building on Grice’s maxim of manner, this study investigates a particular aspect of Hemingway’s style and the way it was mirrored in five Korean translations. In his novella The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway uses the direct speech quotative verb ‘said’ much more frequently than other writers, and produces direct stylistic effects by flouting the sub-maxim ‘avoid unnecessary prolixity’ under Grice’s maxim of manner. This study shows that source-language implicatures should be retained in translations and that the maxim of manner can be used as a valid instrument for evaluating the stylistic adequacy of literary translations.

This study explores the social implications of translation by comparing and analyzing a testimonial novel One Left and its English translation. According to the sociology of translation, the translator-translation outcome-reader response are closely correlated; therefore, they need to be investigated holistically. In this study, the translators’ habitus and capital that made the translation possible are examined, including the publishing field at the time when One Left was published in the Anglo-American society. In addition, the translators’ illusio, i.e., the motivation behind carrying out the translation, is investigated. It turns out that the descriptions of places in the translation are more detailed and specific than those in the original, which strengthens the validity of the existence of comfort stations for foreign readers. Furthermore, how the comfort women had felt and what they had experienced in the comfort stations are more concretely conveyed in translation, which helps readers from other cultures to imagine the victims’ excruciating pain. Thanks to the translators’ practice and effort, readers in the Anglo-American society were able to learn about the painful history of the comfort women and their awareness of the issue has been raised. Such accurate and better understandings of the comfort women issue can lay the foundation for transnational discussions and even resolution of the issue.

It has been 70 years since the signing of Korean Armistice Agreement on July 27, 1953. A translation historian took on a quest to find Korean interpreters who participated in the Armistice Negotiations. Narrowing the research scope to those Korean interpreters who were reserved solely for communications with the negotiating counterparts, the historian charted a search route to primary sources. The explanatory note that the National Institute of Korean History presented to give basic understanding on the Proceedings of Korean Armistice Conferences functioned as a guide, so as to add Sul Chun Sik and To Yu Ho, North Korean interpreters, to the list of interpreters with a language combination of English and Korean. In the further investigation hinted by Kim (2015: 330), the names of K M Chung, Bill Yu, and Y P Kim were added. This finding inevitably demands rewriting of the explanatory note that is presented by the National Institute of Korean History.

This paper focuses on the ellipsis mechanism present in the source text written in Russian and how it appears in the translated Korean literary text. The research reveals that most of the ellipsis mechanism present in the Russian source text was retained in the Korean text. However, in some cases, the Korean translated text did not follow the same ellipsis mechanism as the source text; instead, the translator included the missing sentence components. Approximately 90% of the Russian sentences that had used the ellipsis mechanism remained unchanged in the translated Korean text due to both languages being pro-drop languages. In some cases, the translator did not preserve the source text’s ellipsis mechanism; instead, they included the missing components in the translated text. Restoring components took the form of third-person subject and verb at 31% each, followed by first-person subject at 26%, object at 7%, and second-person subject at 5%. When restoring first and second-person subjects, the text revealed the author’s pragmatic intent by applying a strategy of explicitly including the omitted sentence components. Therefore, when translating, the translator needs to think about the context of the literature and consider whether to retain the ellipsis mechanism present in the source text or include the missing sentence components to preserve the pragmatic intent of the author.