2012, Vol.13, No.5

The Journal of Translation Studies 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 1.49

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

This study explores institutional translation in terms of the ways in which the concept could be utilized not only to enhance our understanding of translation but also to examine, self-reflexively, our approach to studying translation. Although the practice of translation occurring in different levels of institutionalized settings has a long history in many parts of the world, the term institutional translation is relatively new in the discipline of translation studies. This paper approaches the concept of institutional translation as a prototype and argues that while the concept has been understood by some translation researchers as translation taking place in specific organizations committed to carrying out translation for official purposes, institutional translation should be viewed as a form of translation practice occurring within the context of formal or specific organizations and characterized by interaction between the structural aspects of the institution, such as norms, establish roles, text production procedures, and the process and product of translation. The study shows that institutional translation provides a vantage point to analyze such topics as the status of translators, their working conditions, identity, public and self-image, role perceptions, power relations, and ethical dilemmas.

A translated work can never be the same to the original work. Operational definition of translation therefore precede the discussion of the translated work. Incorporating the comparative study for the analysis of a translated work would clear the problem. In this point of view, a comparative study of a translated work should focus on the difference from the original work and how it translated the original meaning. In this paper, translation is operationally defined as a process of rewriting the original work. The process of rewriting involves creative recreation of the original work preserving its original meaning. Heekyung Eun’s novel <Minor League(漢城兄弟)>, which the author of this paper participated in the translation, highlights the challenges in translating diverse literary features of the original work. In case of novel translation, the translator typically focuses on the original author’s writing style which include a figure of speech, rhetoric expressions, idiomatic expressens, onomatopoeia, mimesis and puns. The translator would have to make multiple decisions on how to translate the original work preserving its intention and figurative features. In this paper, the stylistic characteristics of the original work are discussed, and various translation methods are analysed with examples. The methods include omission, addition, creative adoption, rhyme, and explanation.

This study is an attempt to identify the textual norms of news trans-editing, which involves a combination of translation and editing processes. Starting from the discussion of the theories of translation norms and the need for research in this relatively new area, the paper examines a set of the New York Times articles(ST) and their trans-edited versions(TT) selected through modified constructed sampling, with the aim of discovering the textual norms that govern news trans-editing. The paper finds that the articles trans-edited in Korean generally follow the norms commonly operating in news translation, but diverge from it in the structuring of the text and the way the main ideas are presented: translation shifts occurred in more than half of the headlines and all leads, and translation strategies including addition, deletion, change in the order of paragraphs and summarizing were used to better suit the needs of the target readers, to produce rhetorical effects, or to deliver the trans-editor’s subjective opinions. The degree and aspects of trans-editors’ subjective intervention as well as the meta-discourse structure which characterizes the given text’s identity as a (translated) news story suggest that the textual norms of local news-writing may operate in the news trans-editing. Drawing on the findings of the textual analysis, the paper concludes that news trans-editing may have its own translation norms, which cannot be subjected to the conventional adequacy-acceptability criteria.