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This study aims to analyze the front cover composition of translated books, focusing on the title, the name of the author, the name of the translator, the name of the publisher and other additional information. The study examined the cover composition of 62 Korean translations of George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty Four published from the 1970s to the 2020s. The front cover of a translated book is a textual space where new meanings are represented in the target culture, and the composition of the cover can be interpreted as a result of reflecting the characteristics of the social circumstances at the time of publication. The study shows that a variety of factors can influence the front cover composition of the classic literature: characteristics of language use at the time of publication in the target culture; a reputation of the author and the work; the author’s biography; a story of the work; marketing strategies of the publishers; cover composition strategies of foreign publishers; target audiences; and a new interpretation of the work.

With the advent of the digital era, the landscape of book purchasing and consumption has shifted significantly from offline to online, and from print to e-books. This diachronic study seeks to understand how these sociocultural changes have influenced translation and necessitated changes in the analysis of paratexts of translations. The paper begins by examining the limitations of Genette’s traditional division of paratexts into peritexts and epitexts, proposing a framework that divides online paratexts into images and text. Analyzing the online paratexts of 96 translated texts collected from two major domestic online bookstores, the study examines the impact of socioculutral changes on paratexts, identifying key trends and changes in response to these shifts. The findings reveal a marked prominence of feminism in Korea from 2016 to 2019, a diminishing visibility of translators in the e-book-centric market, prevailing norms oriented towards readability and acceptability, and an emphasis on educational purposes reflecting the nation’s exam-driven educational climate. The paper concludes by proposing the need for revisiting traditional concepts and methodologies in Translation Studies.

While film translators are crucial in bridging cultural and linguistic gaps, their contributions often remain underappreciated within the film industry and academia. This study aims to explore the role and visibility of translator Hwang Seok-hee, one of the most prominent film translators in Korea, focusing on paratexts surrounding him. The study analyzes 78 online newspaper articles on the translator and his translated subtitles collected through Google search. By categorizing the articles by subject and examining paratextual elements, the study aims to reveal how the translator’s visibility and communication with viewers influence the audience’s perception of the translator’s role and the translated film’s overall reception. Furthermore, this research analyzes film industry’s institutional practices and norms, uncovering potential factors contributing to the limited visibility of film translators. It also explores the dynamics between translators, distributors, and audiences, seeking to identify possible barriers that impede translators from gaining due recognition for their contributions. The findings of this study provide insights into the current state of film translation practices and the portrayal of translators in the film industry.

This study aims to shed light on the empirical results of translator studies carried out based on field theory, arguably the most widely-adopted theoretical framework in sociology of translation. To help close the domestic research gap in this area, the author carried out a qualitative literature review on empirical translator studies whose theoretical framework stems from Bourdieu’s field theory. It was found that this line of study has been evolving into triangulation that combines various approaches—quantitative and qualitative methods; focusing on outside and inside the translated texts; text analysis and interviews, etc. Also notable from the results of those empirical studies is that translation practice is constantly being shaped by complex interactions between social structures and individuals that include but are not limited to a translator’s life trajectories as well as the social context of translation practice. Despite the success in revealing meaningful aspects of translation practice, sociological approach is not without some methodological shortcomings that could affect the reliability and credibility of research, which is expected to be overcome by further research on a broader range of translators practicing in more diverse areas.

Feminist novel features its tendency to critique gender inequality and misogyny. It generally promotes a very positive perspective of any type of female bonding, which supports the feminist goal of establishing equal civil and social rights for women. In this regard, Cho Nam-joo’s novel Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 is widely perceived as a feminist novel. However, its Chinese translation was not introduced as a feminist novel. Considering that the political and social context in China has been unfavorable for feminism during the late 2010s, this paper focuses on the book’s different reception in China. From the late 2010s until now, feminism confronts grave challenges, as the authoritarian state has been hostile to feminism and openly conservative in its gender policy for reviving patriarchal order. Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 and its Chinese translation are analyzed on the basis of narrative reframing. The analysis draws on the translated text material published in China. Such textual analysis is then combined with references to paratexts including the translator’s preface, literary reviews, and media reports. Narrative reframing is one of the good means to understand the social world around translation. Narrative theory and the notion of framing recognize the power of social structures, and explain translational choices in relation to wider social and political contexts (Baker 2007: 154-155). The empirical analysis of the translated text of Chinese translation of Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 and the paratexts illustrates that the feminist narrative of the original text was undermined in the translation. Through the narrative reframing, feminist narrative was changed into Kim Jiyoung’s ontological narrative, emphasizing her life story. The particular aspects in the feminist narrative were suppressed and deleted. Issues discussed include gender inequality, misogyny, and female bonding. This kind of narrative reframing is related to the views and interests of power groups in China. In the context of a severe backlash against feminism in China, the Chinese government has promoted a public discourse of femininity by rearranging gender practices, which lead to conflict with feminism. This case study demonstrates that translation is a kind of invisible act of control deeply grounded in the political and social context of the target language.

Hall’s Theory of Contexting, which differentiates between high and low-context cultures, has been a prominent framework to understand ways of communication across various cultures. However, this theory may lead to overgeneralization if not applied with caution. Moreover, the pervasive use of the internet in today’s global society could potentially blur the traditional cultural distinctions. To explore these dynamics, this study compares the mobile applications of McDonald’s and Burger King used in the U.S. and in South Korea, which serve as archetypal examples of low and high context cultures, respectively. McDonald’s and Burger King were chosen because of the global recognition of their products and services, encapsulated in the term McDonaldization, which raises the question of whether traditional cultural context distinctions remain relevant in the digital applications of these global companies. The result of the analysis, however, revealed distinct differences in the design and attributes of the mobile applications between the two cultures. This study builds upon a small number of previous works in translation studies that utilized Hall’s theory, extending its application beyond text analysis. It also offers a new perspective by applying the theory of contexting to mobile application design and attributes, a topic rarely explored in translation studies.

This study examines the concept of ‘communities of practice’ and its practical implications in the realm of translation studies, with a specific focus on research into community-oriented amateur translation. Drawing on Wenger’s 1998 conception of communities of practice, this study analyzes how learning and knowledge generation unfold within a fan translation community known as BTS TRANS by employing a qualitative research method, specifically a Focus Group Interview (FGI). The analysis underscores that BTS TRANS embodies a distinct community identity that is dedicated to meticulously translating video content related to BTS. This identity effectively shapes and governs the entire spectrum of their activities. As this identity-driven interaction thrives within the community, members organically and flexibly acquire translation skills, culminating in the creation of translation-related knowledge. Illustrated through the case study of BTS TRANS, the communities of practice framework emerges as a valuable analytical tool. It vividly illustrates how the dynamics of interaction and communication among community members facilitate learning, skill enhancement, and the organic generation of knowledge.

With the rapid advancement of translation technologies such as Google Translate, Papago, and ChatGPT, the user base and application scope of machine translation are expanding swiftly. Given their high performance and efficiency, discussions often revolve around the integration of post-editing training within graduate-level translation education. However, counterarguments propose that fostering students’ translation competence inherently nurtures their post-editing capabilities. Against this backdrop, this study seeks to ascertain whether students can proficiently engage in post-editing without prior specialized training. To achieve this objective, this research involves 11 students participating in a translation classroom setting. They are introduced to various translation machine tools and guided to incorporate these tools into their translation processes. The translation machines they employ and their methodologies are observed. Their translations and reflective commentaries are collected to analyze the types of error corrections made. Additionally, a survey is conducted to corroborate the findings derived from the error correction analysis. The findings reveal that the error corrections made during machine-assisted translation align with recommended post-editing guidelines. Furthermore, these corrections address deficiencies identified in previous post-editing studies. The remaining errors primarily stem from insufficient translation skills rather than inadequate post-editing proficiency. This underscores the necessity of prioritizing the development of translation competence over exclusive post-editing training. The study also underscores the growing enthusiasm among students to leverage machine translation technology as a means to augment their translation capabilities, which should be reflected in the design of machine translation classes.

This study aims to investigate the teaching objectives of Korea’s undergraduate Translation and Interpreting (T&I) degree programs. Since the growth of undergraduate T&I majors in the early 2000s, many studies argued that teaching objectives of undergraduate programs should differentiate themselves from master’s programs since the latter focus on nurturing professional translators and interpreters. They suggest undergraduate programs should aim at fostering students’ bilingual competence, translation competence, and cultural awareness and understanding. This study starts with the question, ‘What is the next step for Korean T&I programs?’ To find the answer, three undergraduate programs were examined; the department of Applied English Linguistics and Translation Studies at Kyung Hee University, English Interpretation and Translation at Dongguk University, and English for International Conferences and Communication at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies. The study analyzed these departments’ online introductions, curricula, and syllabi by applying PACTE’s translation competence model and Revised Bloom’s taxonomy, and compared teaching objectives at three different levels: institution, department, and course. This study argues that more specific teaching objectives at the course level need to be discussed in the following.

Notetaking is a useful skill in consecutive interpreting that assists an interpreter with their memory. However, the useful tool may pose a major obstacle for interpreter trainees. There is a considerable amount of research available that provides general knowledge and various examples of what and how to note (Lee 2017; Gillies 2017). Yet, the research does not seem to provide just enough resources to support beginners in notetaking; and some researchers even suggest that employing the resources is mostly personal preference (J. Choi 1998: 91; Jones 1998/2002). This gap in the perceived number of resources and the seemingly free but let-alone policy from students’ perspectives may posit a need for additional exploration on the subject. Of myriads of items related to practical notetaking resources, this study concentrates on verbs. Verbs are a key constituent in a clause that can be challenging to grasp in speech because it normally comprises only one or two words and is thus quickly followed by the remainder of the clause. The theoretical framework of this study is Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) which, as in interpreting, prioritizes meaning in analyzing texts. The outcome of the study includes suggestions of notetaking symbols for some types of verbs and the affirmation of the researcher’s suggestions as confirmed through usage on the students’ test.

This study aims to produce preliminary translators who can skillfully use ChatGPT in the era of artificial intelligence. In this study, we note that ChatGPT, unlike machine translation, can be used efficiently for large amounts of translation because it can correct errors with less human intervention using continuous prompts. We designed an experiment and analyzed the results to use it for translation education. In the experiment, undergraduate students majoring in translation and interpretation were asked to translate a portion of the novel Kim Ji-young, Born 1982 into Japanese using ChatGPT on two occasions. ChatGPT made frequent errors in the first task, such as not understanding the instructions, reversing previous instructions, and mistranslating cultural elements. In the second task, however, ChatGPT was assigned a role as a condition for writing prompts, informed of the type of text and expected audience, and provided detailed information such as strategies for translation. As a result, the quality of the translations was much higher than in the first task. The students’ survey also showed that ChatGPT still has significant potential, such as expanding the scope of revision through conversation, diversity of information, and ease of operation and storage.

This study aims to identify comprehensive discourse and specific criteria of evaluating musical theatre translation by examining daily newspapers, the most common and accessible forum for musical theatre criticism. Analysis of 200 articles on musical theatre translation published between 2020 and 2022 found three major findings. First, musical translation was paid little attention in musical criticism, which is disproportionate to the significance of licensed musical theatres in South Korea’s musical market. Secondly, six evaluation criteria were elicited as follows: ‘equivalent effect of ST’, ‘social and cultural context of TT’, ‘naturalness of TT’, ‘audience response’, ‘performability’ and ‘faithful reproduction of ST’. Thirdly, translations which satisfy the first two criteria — generate the equivalent effect to that of ST and offer social and cultural context familiar to TT — were most frequently commented and highly praised, indicating TT-oriented tendency in the evaluation discourse and criteria of musical theatre translation. As the first attempt to explore evaluation discourse and criteria of musical theatre translation from commonly used media for criticism, the findings will help identify wider consensus on ‘good musical theatre translation’ and design more systematic and practical evaluation criteria.

This study compares Korean and Chinese translations of haiku, a traditional Japanese poetry form, in order to explore a variety of translation methods and to discuss the resulting issues and effects. The paper analyzes 13 Korean translations and 16 Chinese translations of Matsuo Basho’s renowned haiku The Old Pond (古池) across three dimensions: syllable count (5-7-5), seasonal references (kigo), and cutting words (kireji). Regarding syllable count and kireji, the Korean translations demonstrated greater fidelity to the source text compared to Chinese translations. Concerning kigo, both the Chinese and Korean translations effectively capture the symbolism of the ‘frog’ representing ‘spring.’ However, Chinese translations introduced an issue by adding an adjective, conveying the sense of ‘solitary’ or ‘lonely,’ which was absent in the source text. This addition restricts the reader’s imaginative space. In this study, we have examined how the formal characteristics of haiku poetry, specifically its structural features, are either preserved or lost during the translation process, without delving into the semantic or contextual aspects of the vocabulary used. While it is acknowledged that the study is limited in scope by focusing on a single case, its significance lies in the exploration of diverse translation methods evident in multiple Korean and Chinese translations of haiku. Furthermore, the paper discusses the challenges and effects associated with these translation methods.

Korean poet and translator Kim Jung-hwan has translated a vast body of modern English poetry for over three decades, but due to the lack of critical discourse on poetry translation in Korea, his translations have rarely been reviewed or discussed by critics and scholars. This research offers a close examination of Kim’s translation of The Collected Poems of Seamus Heaney, focusing on four poems from different stages in Heaney’s poetic development, as categorized and structurally analyzed by Helen Vendler. The examination finds that Kim strictly adheres to his principle of translating every element as they are in pursuit of “comparative versification,” James W. Underhill’s concept of translating verse into verse, as opposed to paraphrasing, the more conventional approach in English-into-Korean poetry translation. Kim’s strategy sometimes results in compromises in comprehensibility and syntactic flow, but despite these risks, his translations demonstrate new possibilities in comparative versification in translating English poetry into Korean.

This study aims to examine the translation aspects of sexually explicit words in different Korean translations of the Bible by constructing lexical-semantic fields. To objectively categorize sexually explicit words, three types of lexical-semantic fields (implicit, referential, metaphorical) are constructed. The results show that depending on the translation method, the translation aspects and the frequency of sexually explicit words differ in each lexical-semantic field. Additionally, differences exist in the semantic properties that constitute each sexually explicit word in the lexical-semantic fields. The implicit field mainly includes sexually explicit words involving ‘bodily activities’ or ‘human relationships’ such as ‘간음 (adultery)’ and ‘동침 (sleep with)’. The referential field includes a significant number of words related to ‘people’ and ‘wrongful conduct’ such as ‘창녀 (harlot)’ and ‘음행 (whoredom)’. In the metaphorical field, words expressing ‘body parts’ such as ‘하체 (lower body)’ and ‘넓적다리 (thigh)’, or ‘states’ such as ‘벌거벗음 (nakedness)’ are prominent. This suggests that while the Hebrew Bible uses euphemisms regarding sex, Korean Bibles reveal sexual mentions explicitly. For illegal or negative sexual acts, it uses words that explicitly indicate their meaning, and instead of referring to specific body parts related to sex, it expands them to broader areas or expresses them differently, thereby mitigating the level of explicitness.

The Civil Code is China’s primary legislation and the first law designated as the “code” within China’s legal system. This study selected 1,258 articles from the Chinese Civil Code to create a machine translation system specialized for the Chinese-to-Korean legal domain. First, the selected articles were translated using the Naver Papago machine translation system. After the translation, errors found in each article were systematically compiled and categorized by type, including message, language and grammar, structure. The analysis showed a significant frequency of errors, especially in legal terminology and punctuation usage. Although the study is limited by insufficient data for thorough analysis constructing an extensive corpus of legal texts and scrutinizing their characteristics for a highly specialized machine translation in the legal domain would result in a more apparent domain-specific effect. The changing landscape of the legal market, resulting from factors like legal market liberalization, emphasizes the need for specialized machine translation within the legal domain to keep up with significant demand for legal translation. Considering the situation, this study identifies specific error instances from the perspective of translation research, enabling engineering scholars to recognize the prevalent errors in Chinese-to-Korean legal machine translation, thereby reducing the gap between the roles played in research by translation and engineering scholars and identifying areas for cooperation and collaboration between the two studies.

The present study explores whether new shifts have developed in the stylistic landscape of human vs. machine translation in the wake of ChatGPT’s arrival. For this purpose, it conducts a series of principal component analyses (PCAs) on a normalized frequency dataset comprising 67 morphological and syntactic linguistic features borrowed from Biber’s (1988) research on register variation. The dataset is derived from a corpus of Korean editorials from three Korean newspapers, their human English translations, and English translations generated by four machine translation systems (Papago, Google, DeepL, ChatGPT), including ChatGPT’s self-proofread versions. The analyses indicate that human and machine translation remain distinctly differentiated in terms of style, as demonstrated in previous studies. However, among the machine translation systems, ChatGPT, both in its translations and self-proofread versions, deviates significantly from the others. A closer examination of the linguistic features strongly associated with ChatGPT reveals that this difference can be attributed to the model’s intrinsic preference for a formal, written style. Notably, there are no substantial stylistic divergences between ChatGPT’s translations and its self-proofread versions.

This study aims to conduct a comparative analysis of the usage patterns of the Korean adverbial particle ‘e’ and its corresponding equivalents in Uzbek, based on a Korean-Uzbek parallel corpus. The Korean adverbial particle ‘e’ encompasses various usages and meanings. At the beginner level, learners typically acquire its usage in relation to places, times, and other contexts. Its Uzbek counterpart ‘-da’ offers a relatively clear parallel form. However, at the intermediate and advanced levels, as various examples not covered at the beginner level emerge, learners often make substitution errors and encounter challenges in understanding ‘e’ beyond its roles as locative and temporal markers. The analysis results reveal that instances where ‘e’ corresponds to Uzbek ‘-da’ are predominantly observed in the context of location and time, with diverse usages and equivalents becoming evident at the advanced level. Notably, the most frequent correspondence is identified between ‘e’ and Uzbek’s ‘-ga’. This study can serve as foundational material for translation studies and education in both Korean and Uzbek languages.

In this study, a survey was conducted of users of interpreting services to find out which mode of interpreting they preferred the most. Forty Korean employees of a foreign financial institution in Korea, who work with interpreters on a regular basis, participated in this study. Participants were instructed to answer questions on two different settings of interpreting: conference and in-house interpreting. In the conference interpreting setting, participants were asked to choose between human interpreting, AI interpreting and subtitles after watching an English speech with the three modes of interpreting into Korean. They liked subtitles the most, followed by human interpreting, and AI was the least preferred. Accuracy of interpreting was found not to be a decisive factor in user preferences because AI was the least preferred despite being the most accurate. That said, accuracy still influenced their choice as participants preferred human interpreters more when they were more accurate. The reasons participants chose human interpreters over AI included natural tone and comfortable voice. In the in-house interpreting setting where the choice was between human and AI interpreting, human interpreters were favored over AI for their ability to engage in open discussions, their knowledge of the internal matters of the company, etc. These results show that user preferences are influenced by a variety of non-linguistic factors while users certainly value accuracy of interpreting. This suggests that it is the very human qualities that give human interpreters a competitive advantage over AI, and that there is still significant demand for these uniquely human roles.