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A Comparative Study of Loan Words in the Korean Original Texts and Translated Text

Soon Mi Kim 1

1숙명여자대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

As cultural words and concepts from foreign countries, especially English-speaking countries, become international in their domain, words to express new things and concepts are borrowed from foreign languages. Moreover, with the explosive increase in commercial, technological, and cultural exchanges between countries and a growing receptiveness of Korean people toward foreign cultures and languages, more loan words are used in both the original Korean texts and translated texts than before. In this environment, it becomes more difficult for translators to decide when to use loan words and when to use Korean equivalent words. This study aims at analyzing the use of loan words in the translated text and finding what kind of words are frequently used in these texts and why. When studying the use of foreign words in translation, it is important to see how foreign words are used in the Korean original texts and compare their loan word usage with that of translated texts. Two Korean popular economics genre books and two translated books from the similar genre are analyzed. The results showed that the loan words used in the Korean original texts and translated texts are very similar both in technical terminology and everyday language. Translators used loan words when they failed to retrieve an equivalent way of expressing the same concept in their own language; or they may use loan words on purpose to evoke exotic meanings and attach prestige value. What translators should be careful about is when they use loan words as a way to get their jobs done more conveniently by not searching for the right expressions or vocabularies in their target language.

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* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.

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