2017, Vol.18, No.1

The Journal of Translation Studies 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 1.49

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

The purpose of this study is to investigate the structures of titles in children’s literature between ST and TT. This research suggests that there are five common and three distinctive characteristics (called principles and variations respectively in this paper) out of 1924 titles of ST and TT: (1) both ST and TT have more Phrasal form titles than the Sentential form, (2) NP structures among Phrasal form titles appear the most, (3) NP2 appear more than NP1 in both ST and TT, (4) full-sentence CP titles among CP forms are the most, and (5) a tendency to be translated into similar structures from ST to TT are detected. Meanwhile (i) TT-CP appears at a higher rate than ST-CP, (ii) ST-NP1 appears a higher rate than TT-NP1, and (iii) ST-NP1 forms are translated more into TT-NP2 than TT-NP1 unlike the result (5). The data are limited to English-Korean translated children's books; structural analysis is only conducted. However, the analysis method of this paper would be applicable to the other literatures. Considering this point, researches on non-translated books, multilingual translation books, or other genres are hoped to be carried out in the subsequent studies.

This study delved into the process of polysystem theory application in Korea from the selection of literary works for translation to shifts in translation activities. According to the polysystem theory, many systems in the target culture correlate in the way source texts are selected for translation and translated into target texts. A previous researcher(Chang, Nam Fung) specified the theory and categorized the systems into political, ideological, economical, linguistic, literary, and translational polysystems after being conscious of criticisms about the theory that it is too subjective or unspecified to apply for further research. Based on the suggested augmented version of the polysystem theory, this study contemplated it further, reflecting specific cases and circumstances in Korea. On top of that, this paper suggested to add a responsive polysystem among other things because readers, these days, are more likely to express their opinions about translation than before thanks to the development of the Internet and the media, and their responses are getting critical in that they have a bigger impact on the actual translation activities.

The purpose of this study is to explore the possibility of collection translation through analyzing the elements of literary style. The literature used in this study, The Muk’am Collection, was written by Seon Master Muk’am Choinul in the late Joseon Korea period. As the late Joseon Korea period when this collection was published was the closest time from now, we can compare the terms used at that time with the terms being used in the current Buddhist world. Furthermore, it has high historical values because the late Joseon Korea period was the most precarious time in the Buddhist history, so Seon Master Muk’am made an effort to express the essence of Buddhism through his work. I divided the literary style into two kinds of elements: poetic elements and cognitive elements. For the poetic elements, the repetition of grammar expression and the omission of duplicated morphemes, the same rhymes were used to emphasize the feeling of cadence and enhance the poetic sense. On the other hand, for the cognitive elements, the understanding of (Buddhist) terms, word choice, structural transposition, and complementary paratexts were used to let readers easily understand and accept the work. Those two kinds of elements play basic roles within contexts. With such factors, this research aims to examine whether more weight should be placed on semantic translation, which is based on faithfulness, or communicative translation, which is based on acceptability or readability, and how to apply it in the process of analyzing the two elements. According to Newmark (1981), it is difficult to satisfy both of the faithfulness and the acceptability or the readability. Fulfilling both of them would give the best translation, but translators’ abilities are different, so I think that this is an English translation task to be solved in the future. Based on this study, I look forward to carrying out various researches on the possibility of English translation of other Buddhist Collections by analyzing basic elements of literary style and wish to use this opportunity for more in-depth research.