2002, Vol.3, No.1

The Journal of Translation Studies 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 1.49

pISSN : 1229-795X
https://journal.kci.go.kr/kats

Translation, Sciences/Culture/National Strength, and English EducationKyung-il Park(Kyung Hee Univ.)Translation is one of the most important ways of "sharing information across cultural borders in a world constantly growing smaller" and so nowadays keen awareness of the significance of developing and establishing a proper and healthy translation culture has been rapidly increasing. It may even be said that all the humanities, arts, sciences and other cultures of a country entirely depend upon this proper and healthy translation culture, which in turn means that a country's progress and prosperity cannot help being founded upon this culture. On the other hand, a corrupt wasteland of (mis-) translations poses a serious threat to the progress and prosperity of a country. To prevent this kind of national mishaps is the most urgent and pressing imperative on the current national agenda. These considerations indicate the urgent necessity to set up in this country right circumstances for a desirable translation culture, which may be realized and accelerated by immediately institutionalizing translation criticism and by radically reforming the traditional as well as current foreign language, especially English, education towards one which is reading/writing-oriented, instead of speaking- oriented.

Translation Problems between Korean and English Reflecting their Structural Differences: with Respect to the Translation of Reported SpeechYoung-Ok Lee(Kyung Hee University)It is difficult to provide correct translation between two languages like Korean and English as they are different in pragmatic aspects as well as in grammatical or syntactic aspects. English can be characterized as noun-centered in contrast with verb-centered Korean in that English has many functions in a sentence that should be fulfilled by nouns or noun phrases―nominals, while Korean sentences have a verb at the end with various forms of suffix added according to certain sociolinguistic standards as well as the sentence types.While the reported speech can be classified into two main types, direct and indirect speeches, Korean has a different pattern of reported speech from that of English, which can be attributed to the two languages' difference in noun- vs. verb-centeredness. As in Korean, the various forms of sentence ending deliver the social and cultural information concerning the relative status of the speaker and hearer, to report the exact form of the sentence spoken by someone else amounts to giving the sociolinguistic information related to the speaker and hearer's social status as well as the meaning of the sentence itself. This is not the case in English where the difference between the spoken and written styles is minimum in contrast to Korean. In English, the direct speech form can be matched to the indirect speech form with minimum loss of information; the extralinguistic, i.e., sociolinguistic information is not so manifestly reflected in the sentence forms actually spoken. This study shows such differences in delivering a reported speech between Korean and English and relates those differences to the two languages' basic differences in verb- vs. noun-centeredness.

The Impact of the Minimalist Program on Interpretation StrategiesPark, Yukyoung(Hoseo University)The central aim of this paper is to see the impact of the MP (Minimalist Program) on students' linguistic competence and interpretive ability by analyzing their interpretation errors, after feature instruction in interpretation courses. Interpreters must express the incoming messages into the form that is most appropriate to the target language. Therefore, those aspiring to be good interpreters must acquire linguistic proficiency in the target language as well as interpretation skills. However, many Korean university students have the wrong notion that language is a one-to-one correspondence and that a lexical item is composed only of meaning and pronunciation, with the grammar component to be learned independently. This notion inevitably leads to a great number of interpretation errors. Chomsky (1993, 1995) holds that a lexical item is composed of phonetic, semantic, and formal features and that phrases are formed by combining words based on the formal (i.e. selectional and checking) features of lexical items. Under the assumption that formal feature instruction may play a crucial role in enhancing interpreters' linguistic competence, this paper shows the result of a pilot study that applied the MP to interpretation courses. After taking feature instruction for two or three semesters, some university students could decrease their interpretation errors considerably. Therefore, it is assumed that people who are interested in second language learning or interpretation need to study the MP in order to comprehend and acquire native speakers' intuitive knowledge of language.