2019, Vol.20, No.1

The Journal of Translation Studies 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 1.49

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

Since the establishment of the Korean Food Promotion Institute (formerly, the Korean Food Foundation) in 2009, ten years have passed with the globalization of Korean food becoming not just a simple slogan but a policy project. This study aims to analyze the standardization project of translating Korean food names into foreign languages that has been implemented for the globalization of Korean food. The study conducts a comparative analysis of translation of Korean names into Chinese by the Korea Tourism Organization and the Korean Food Promotion Institute as these two organizations currently provide the broadest and most reliable translation (drafts) of Korean food names. According to the analysis, the proportion of disagreement in translation of the two organizations reaches 44 percent. Factors for disagreement can be categorized into “disagreement in expression” and “disagreement in information.” The former category can be, again, divided into 1) food material, 2) form, 3) recipe, 4) taste, and the latter into 1) the order of information arrangements and 2) the amount of information. This study is expected to lay the foundation for qualitative development for standardization of translation of Korean food names into Chinese.

As machine translation post-editing (MTPE) has become a common practice among language service providers (LSPs), and universities have an urgent need to incorporate MTPE into their curriculum, a common interest on MTPE practices led to the forming of a university-industry joint research team between The Korean Association for Translation Studies (KATS) and The Korea IT Globalization Organization (KIGO). This collaborative study aims to explore the following issues: First, the productivity of MTPE results gauged in terms of two factors, the amount of time spent on post-editing of raw MT outputs against human translation time, and TER (Translation Edit Rate) of MTPE results; Second, error rates of the most representative free online machine translations (FOMT) for the English-Korean language pair, such as Google Translate, Naver’s Papago, and Kakao i in terms of mistranslation, accuracy, terminology, formatting, and spelling. Fifteen undergraduate and graduate students majoring translation participated in the study to produce translation and MTPE results of five IT manuals provided by the participating LSPs. For 13 out of 15 participants, the temporal and technical MTPE　efforts were found to be much reduced. Regarding the MT engine error rate, Google Translate was found to have a much lower error rate against Papago and Kakao i in processing IT manuals; however, this result needs further investigation with more variables.

This article analyzes the aesthetic effect of the deletions from the French translation, L’Harmonium (2001), of Yi Ch’ŏngjun’s novel, Hŭin’ot (1994). When translating, it is often necessary to modify the explicit/implicit ratio which can vary according to the languages involved. In cases of implicitation, some elements disappear but equivalence presents identity of meaning in different forms. Such cases correspond to ellipsis. Other cases are considered as deletion. The translators and editors of L’Harmonium have removed opaque cultural elements, repetitive explanations, descriptions of landscape or secondary characters, etc. for the French readership. While their intervention has the effect of making the reading more fluid, some deletions affect the aesthetic dimension of the work. In chapter 2, the translation omitted the memory of the protagonist and narrator, Chongsŏn, of his father and the story of his own failures. This weakens one of the narrative axes of rewriting history through individual narratives, in this case the generational conflict against the backdrop of ideological confrontation prevailing since the Korean War. In the last chapter, two major parts are removed: the detailed explanation of two opposing music styles, moegunnori and pŏgu nong-ak, respectively symbolizing threatening hostility and peaceful symbiosis, and the detailed movements of the shamanic ceremony ssikkimgut (wiryŏnggut) intended not only to appease the souls of the dead but also to heal the wounds of the survivors to convey the message of peace and reconciliation. For this reason, it is necessary to retranslate the novel.