2025, Vol.26, No.4

The Journal of Translation Studies 2025 KCI Impact Factor : 2.77

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

This study analyzes the translation strategies applied to signs that serve as clues in the process of deciphering cryptograph, a major narrative device in Edgar Allan Poe’s novel The Gold-Bug. The analysis divides the deciphering process into eight steps and classifies the key signs for each step as icons, indices, or symbols on the basis of Peirce’s typology. It then examines how four Korean translations of the novel (TT1, TT2, TT3, and TT4) handle these signs. The findings indicate that the translators used differing strategies, including omission, representation, and modification. With respect to each deciphering step, the strategy of omitting some steps appears prominent in TT1 and TT3. Regarding sign types, icon signs such as the images of the gold-bug, the skull, and the kid are generally maintained, while diagrammatic elements such as the character frequency table and alphabet substitution table tend to be either omitted or altered in their representation. Among the symbol signs, the deciphering process for wordplay is omitted in all translations except TT4, and the cryptograph appears only in TT2 and TT4. These results suggest that translators approach cryptographic signs differently depending on the target readers, the role and function of the target text, and the publisher’s intentions.

This study examines Kim Myŏng-sun’s 1922 translation of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “To Helen.” As a pioneering female author in colonial Korea, she was the first to translate Poe’s poetry into Korean. A comparison with Kuriyagawa Hakuson’s Japanese translation reveals that many of the divergences in Kim’s version from the original can be largely attributed to her reliance on the Japanese text. It is also worth noting that the omission of “wanderer bore” and the restructuring of the stanzas appear only in her translation, shifts that foreground Helen’s presence while marginalizing that of the male speaker in the poem. Given that her translated works have often been underappreciated on account of mistranslations, these findings invite a reassessment of her translation as a manifestation of her agency as a female writer in early modern Korea.

Since the publication of the first Korean translation of John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress in 1895, a substantial number of translations have appeared over approximately 130 years. While this long translation history has attracted scholarly interest, existing studies have generally focused on a small group of early translations and translators. This study seeks to address this gap by conducting a diachronic survey of all available Korean translations published to date. It also briefly explores translator visibility through Gérard Genette’s theory of paratext. The dataset consists of 175 translations listed by the National Library of Korea, which are used to produce diachronic “snapshots” of changing translation practices. Of these, 111 translations for adult readers were produced by 48 translators; for each translator, their earliest translation was selected for closer analysis of visibility. The findings suggest that (1) Korean translations, which peaked in the 1980s, are unlikely to decline in number, partly due to the ongoing production of modernized versions, and (2) translators tend to be less visible than expected, because peritextual elements that would highlight their role have increasingly been taken over by editors and other third parties.