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Korean Orthography of Loanwords and Romanization of Korean From the Viewpoint of Translation

Jeong-Woo Kim 1

1경남대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This paper aims at shedding light on the solution of unsettled issues around two Korean written norms, Korean orthography of loanwords and Romanization of Korean, by introducing new viewpoint of translation. The results discussed so far are as follows: Korean orthography of loanwords (abbreviated KOL, hereafter) is mere a written system to make loanwords, which are translated into Korean from foreign languages, spelled, not to dictate their phonetic forms. (In case of spell-to-spell translation, KOL works vacuously. The user (writer) and the reader of KOL are all Koreans. The Korean Standard Pronunciation doesn't provide any regulation for loanwords. Thus, the related written norms should be revised in their detailed parts so that the basic principles to appraise standard words be applied to loanwords in the same manner. Additionally, the pragmatic explicitation by revealing and adding general meaning contained in place names, to their translated phonetic forms, is helpful for readers to understand its meaning more clearly. The Romanization of Korean (abbreviated RoK, hereafter) is regarded as a kind of translation process or its product to render phonetic forms of Korean words into Romanized forms. Though sharing common character to express Korean by foreign symbols, Chinese characters or Roman alphabets, with Chinese-character-borrowed written system in ancient Korean, RoK is used in foreign language contexts contrary to Chinese-character-borrowed written system having used in Korean context. Therefore, the former could be considered as a translation process, while the latter, as a mere writing product. The producers (user or writer) of RoK are Koreans and its consumers (reader) are foreigners using Roman alphabets. So RoK system should reflect Korean linguistic sense on its concrete contents. In RoK system, hyphen is overloaded functionally, being used in more than one situation. This problem should be overcome for the efficiency of mechanic recognition and process of Romanized words. In such a very similar way as in KOL, the pragmatic explicitation could be introduced in RoK for the same effect.

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