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A Meta­reflection on the Translation Theories of the Humanities

Jon Sung-Gi 1

1고려대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

How should the texts of the humanities be translated? This is a question that troubles us all as we are witnessing what some call a «crisis of the humanities» as well as a relegation of our culture in translating texts of the humanities. We know that the translation is the basis of the Korean Humanities, largely indebted to the humanities translation, but there are not yet many translational studies thoroughly concerned with it. We need to reflect on all these problems, and that’s what we suggest in the foreword, After examining the epistemology of translation studies in section 2 and the «scientificity» of translation theories of the humanities in section 3, we reconsider the problem of the relation between the text types and their translation in section 4. In section 5, we describe briefly several theories of explicit and implicit translation theories in the humanities. In section 6, we look at «translation as inquiry» and its implication in «urimal­lo hakmun­hagi» (doing humanities in Korean). Finally, we conclude by emphasizing the necessity of meta­reflections on the translation theories of the humanities not only for translating texts of the humanities, but also and particularly for the so-called «translational humanities», a project that we have been trying to develop for several years. Our hope is to see these «translational humanities» become a new paradigm for Korean Humanities, in the near future.

Citation status

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

This paper was written with support from the National Research Foundation of Korea.