KJCKorea
Journal Central

This article focuses on the problem of translation in the recognition and reception of Han Kang’s The Vegetarian as world literature, particularly noting that at the core of its English translation―conceived as a process of homogenizing alterity and rendering the text more easily legible―lies an epistemic framework of gender. The English translation of The Vegetarian adjusts the text so that the female protagonist’s resistance can be signified as autonomous and self-determining, in order to rescue the work from the ‘misreading’ that dismisses Yeong-hye’s becoming-plant as sheer madness; this modification has been defended as a form of ‘feminist translation.’ Yet this article argues that such a translational move constitutes a significant political failure, for it erases the problem of the “difficult readability of embodied agency,” which is crucial to the novel’s reception, and forecloses the possibility of interrogating and renewing our very framework of the political through such an encounter. It critiques prevailing practices of gender translation which, when women’s texts produced in non-Western cultural contexts such as The Vegetarian are excavated and circulated in the world literature market, reaffirm and reproduce already formalized and generalized models of women’s oppression and subjectivation. At the same time, the article proposes a new horizon of gender translation as a critical juncture that responds to the embodied agency of gendered subaltern subjects―agency that resists easy reduction to existing political frameworks―and reworks the very problem-space of women’s literature itself.

This paper analyzed YouTube comments on Korean military reality programs Steel Troops 3 (2023) and Steel Troops W (2024) using text mining techniques to explore gender representation and reception patterns in militarized entertainment content. The research collected comments from the top 100 videos by viewership, analyzing a total of 19,081 comments—9,371 from Steel Troops 3 and 9,710 from Steel Troops W —through sentiment analysis and topic modeling. Sentiment analysis revealed that while Steel Troops 3 showed 56.76% positive responses, Steel Troops W demonstrated a higher positive rate of 66.82%. However, the negative comment ratio showed a significant difference, with Steel Troops W at 15.52% compared to Steel Troops 3 at 7.14%—more than twice as high. In negative comments about Steel Troops W , “woman” (189 occurrences) and “female soldier” (135 occurrences) emerged as the top keywords, confirming that prejudices against female soldiers persist. Topic modeling revealed that female participants in Steel Troops W were evaluated based on dual standards of military capability and femininity, with discourse related to female conscription and gender equality debates comprising 37% of all discussions. Consequently, the Steel Troops series has evolved beyond simple entertainment consumption into a forum for social discourse, demonstrating that gender functions as a key variable in shaping public discourse around military-themed entertainment programs.