2021, Vol.22, No.2

The Journal of Translation Studies 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 1.49

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

This articles aims to study the translating strategies of The Struggle behind the Iron Curtain and to reveal how the strategies are related to the institutional agendas and social and political context in 1949 in Korea. Employing a data mining program, this study compares the source texts and the texts selected for translation and discusses the differences of the topics the two texts dealt with and the political and historical implications of the results. In terms of micro-level translation, appraisal theory is applied to text analysis and reveals that the translating agents consciously manipulated the text, stressing the violent, merciless and sly character of soviet communism and the superiority of democracy. The results imply that the translation, as an institutional translation, reflects the agents’ institutional aims – the promotion of anti-communism and the legitimation of the new government – and their close connection with the fledgling government.

The translation of Korean literary works has received considerable attention in domestic translation studies, but little attention has been paid to the role of literary translators. Hence, this study aims to spotlight literary translators by means of an interview with two representative Korean-to-English literary translators, Bruce and Ju-Chan Fulton. The interview investigates their task in deciding to translate Kim Soom’s novel “한 명” and finally securing publication of their translation, One Left. The interview results bring to the fore a portrait of literary translators as enthusiastic artists who select a literary work to translate based on their own values and beliefs, who translate with deep affection and respect for an author and her work, and who undergo ceaseless negotiations with publishers and literary agents to get their work published — an enormous and time-consuming effort mostly hidden and rarely discussed so far. The results point to the necessity of shedding further light on the role of literary translators and their extra-textual efforts in order to better understand the sociocultural and socioeconomic aspects of literary translation.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the actual condition of the Chinese-Korean metaphoric translation shown in the headlines and to examine the usefulness of the translation strategy based on the Relevance theory. To this end, 547 metaphorical expressions were extracted from the Xinhua Net to build a Chinese-Korean parallel corpus. The finding shows that, there were six metaphor translation strategies used in the news headlines, which are literal translation with the same metaphor, replacement with another metaphor, description with a non-metaphoric expression, adding explanation to the metaphor, omitting the metaphor, and changing to symbol. The ‘literal translation’ was used with the highest frequency. ‘Description’ was the second highest, which seems to have paid more attention to the meaning of metaphors in the translation process due to the nature of informational texts. Whereas, ‘Replacement’ has not been utilized much in the creative metaphor because of the strong novelty and intention of the creative metaphor. ‘Adding explanation’ are rarely used in conventional metaphors. ‘Omitting’ can be used for brevity when the amount of information overlaps, but care must be taken not to omit important information. In addition, the case of changing to symbol is intended to be expressed as concisely as possible due to the spatial constraints of the headlines.