KJCKorea
Journal Central

This study analyzed how the explicit personal pronoun subjects in the Chinese source text of Lu Xun's A Madman's Diary are realized across three Korean translated versions. The correspondence patterns in the Korean translations were classified into four categories: explicit use of pronouns, explicit use of nouns or terms of address, subject omission, and sentence restructuring. The results indicated that first-person subjects tend to be explicitly stated when emphasizing the speaker's identity or agency, whereas they are generally omitted in discourse contexts where the speaker's identity is self-evident. Second-person subjects were either explicitly maintained as pronouns in scenes involving criticism, warning, or persuasion, or converted into terms of address such as 'brother' (hyung, hyungnim) to reflect the relational dynamics between characters. Third-person subjects were primarily realized as either pronouns or relational terms of address to clarify the specific character or group being referred to. By focusing exclusively on the explicit subjects in the source text, this study aimed to demonstrate that the translation of personal pronoun subjects in Chinese-Korean literary translation is a strategic choice intricately linked to discourse context, character relationships, and referential clarity.

This study analyzes the official Chinese subtitles of the Korean historical drama The Tyrant’s Chef to examine how culture-specific elements of Korean sageuk are translated into Chinese and to propose improved translation strategies. Combining modern Korean with historical speech styles and featuring numerous court, institutional, and cultural expressions from the Joseon dynasty, the drama provides a valuable corpus for investigating historical drama translation. Focusing on four categories—terms of address and honorifics, official titles and administrative offices, institutional and cultural terminology, and idiomatic expressions—this study compares the Simplified Chinese subtitles (TT1) and Traditional Chinese subtitles (TT2) and proposes revised translations (TT3). The findings indicate that, despite Korea and China sharing a common Sinographic cultural tradition, literal translation often fails to convey the semantic and pragmatic functions of Korean historical expressions because identical Chinese characters may represent different institutions, hierarchies, and cultural meanings. To address this issue, the study identifies four effective translation strategies: domestication, which recontextualizes the Joseon hierarchy for Chinese audiences; functional equivalence, which replaces Korean official titles with Chinese counterparts of comparable function and status; explicitation, which clarifies culturally embedded meanings; and idiomatic equivalence, which adopts conventional expressions from Chinese historical dramas. This study contributes to the relatively underexplored field of Chinese translation of Korean historical dramas by proposing practical translation strategies and providing a foundation for the development of a Korean–Chinese glossary of sageuk terminology and translation guidelines for future subtitle production.

This study examines the phonological-stylistic functions of rhyme characters in twenty-three regulated verses by Du Fu included in Three Hundred Tang Poems. Rhyme categories follow the Pingshui rhyme system, while rhyme endings are grouped, with reference to Guangyun, into /-m/, /-n/, /-ŋ/, and analytically open types. These labels are functional categories rather than reconstructions of Tang pronunciation. Recurrent rhyme patterns contribute to acoustic cohesion and closure without independently determining emotion. In “Spring View” (春望), the 侵 rhyme corresponds to a progression from war and family separation to bodily decline. In “Ascending the Heights” (登高), the 灰 rhyme and first-line rhyme help integrate expansive landscape and the ailing self. Rhyme is thus interpreted as a stylistic device interacting with parallelism, compositional structure, and semantic progression. Because the corpus is a later anthology, the findings are not generalized to Du Fu’s complete oeuvre.