2011, Vol.12, No.3

The Journal of Translation Studies 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 1.49

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

Demand for the translation of legal texts is on the rise, with Korea’s elevated status. Legal translation needs to be more accurate than any other text and plays a special role in regulating the society. Therefore, legal translators should recognize the features of legal texts and employ optimal translation strategies. This study aims to explore the features of legal language/sentences and the functions of legal texts. Based on a clear understanding, the paper deals with the strategies to translate legal texts. Specifically, this study touches on the characteristics and types of legal language and explores the conventional practices in the use of legal sentences of both English and Korean. It presents two major functions of legal texts: descriptive and normative. The functions, however, can be changed by translation purpose, i.e. normative legal documents can become descriptive when they are translated for research, not for legal effect. This paper introduces and compares three researchers’ translation strategies, and claims that transposition; expansion and reduction; and modulation are the most “appropriate” strategies. The author hopes this study will contribute to triggering further discussion on the translation of legal texts and to presenting guidelines for those in the translation profession.

After the concept of feminism of the West was introduced to China at the end of the 19th Century, it began to take root in China also. With the People’s Republic of China established in 1920, the Chinese intellectuals began repatriating from their studies abroad and enlightening the Chinese people. They did a lot of things like publishing the magazine named “New Youth”. At the turning point of literary development, China began to complement their literature and culture with many translated versions of foreign literature. The Chinese government carried out political, moral and cultural revolutions on the basis of those translations. Among others, the concept of women’s liberalization became one of the most sensational issues in the Chinese society and culture. With the introduction of the western literature, feminism stood out and came to the centerstage of social arguments. The translated works not only gave rise to the feminist literture, but built the foundation of development of the Chinese national literature and the translation theories. They greatly influenced the translation studies of feminist works of the West in the 1980s.

The aim of this paper is to propose ways in which the ambiguous polyphony of Free Indirect Discourse (FID) in a French source text can be reproduced in a Korean target text. Ambiguous polyphony is the key feature that distinguishes FID from other types of discourse such as Direct Discourse and Indirect Discourse. It eradicates the syntactic boundary between the voices of the narrator and the character(s) in the novel text and mixes their voices in a phrase of FID. Therefore, it must be reproduced in the translation of FID. This study explains the polyphonic features and the indices of FID generally applicable to languages and examines the propositions of previous studies concerning the translations of FID in literary texts. Syntactic, stylistic, and typographic indices of FID in French and Korean language are then suggested, with particular attention drawn to the differences between the syntactic indices of the two languages. This is followed by a proposal of possible ways to reproduce the polyphony of French FID in the Korean translation using the indices of Korean FID. The study concludes with a review of the appropriateness of the reproduction of polyphony of the FID in Korean translations of the French novel, Madame Bovary.