• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
• /
• v.17 no.10
• /
• pp.657-666
• /
• 2017

This paper explored contrasting responses of the press and the academic circle to The Vegetarian, the 2016 Man Booker International Prize winner, and delved into the controversy over its faithfulness to Han Kang's Ch'aesikjuuija. In the comparison of Han Kang's Ch'aesikjuuija and Deborah Smith's The Vegetarian, many mistranslation cases have been found in The Vegetarian. This paper is meaningful in that it did not stop at discussing translation errors in The Vegetarian but probed the cause of Smith's mistranslation and that it identified The Vegetarian as an English localization text, instead of a translation text. This paper concludes with a discussion of the achievements of The Vegetarian as Smith's rewriting of Ch'aesikjuuija and makes suggestions as to what translators and the academic world can do for the reader and the English translation of Korean literature in the future.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
• /
• v.45
• /
• pp.109-143
• /
• 2016

This article examines distinctive linguistic shifts of translational English in an effort to verify the validity of the translation universals hypotheses, including simplification, explicitation, normalization and leveling-out, which have been most heavily explored to date. A large-scale study involving comparable corpora of translated and non-translated English newspaper texts has been carried out to typify particular linguistic attributes inherent in translated texts. The main findings are as follows. First, by employing the parameters of STTR, top-to-bottom frequency words, and mean values of sentence lengths, the translational instances of simplification have been detected across the translated English newspaper corpora. In contrast, the portion of function words produced contrary results, which in turn suggests that this feature might not constitute an effective test of the hypothesis. Second, it was found that the use of connectives was more salient in original English newspaper texts than translated English texts, being incompatible with the explicitation hypothesis. Third, as an indicator of translational normalization, lexical bundles were found to be more pervasive in translated texts than in non-translated texts, which is expected from and therefore support the normalization hypothesis. Finally, the standard deviations of both STTR and mean sentence lengths turned out to be higher in translated texts, indicating that the translated English newspaper texts were less leveled out within the same corpus group, which is opposed to what the leveling-out hypothesis postulates. Overall, the results suggest that not all four hypotheses may qualify for the label translation universals, or at least that some translational predictors are not feasible enough to evaluate the effectiveness of the translation universals hypotheses.

• Proceedings of the Korea Contents Association Conference
• /
• 2010.05a
• /
• pp.289-291
• /
• 2010

외국문학은 디지털콘텐츠의 경우 한국어와 영어를 동시에 번역, 문학의 시공간을 현재에 공간으로 다양하게 접근시켜 가보고 싶은 곳으로 이끈다. 작품을 체계적인 분류를 통해 상징적인 코드를 수용자의 선호도를 바탕으로 정보를 나열하고 재조립하고 수용자 스스로가 상징적인 코드를 스스로 만들어가는 즐거움이 바로 문학지도의 개발이다.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
• /
• v.45
• /
• pp.55-83
• /
• 2016

To provide a set of data with which instructors may boost the sagging demand for Anglo-American poetry classes, this thesis classifies the kinds of difficulties the students face in reading English poems. Asses to the classification is an analysis on the causes of the difficulties at different levels of the reading process, from the linguistic to the cultural. Arnoldian insight argues that poetry is the best of all forms of writing. Without an ample exposure to poetry, average English majors would barely sharpen the skills that they use to deal with other kinds of writing. To help ease the continuing need for a workable teaching model in English poetry reading classes, this thesis suggests focusing on the kinds of wrong translations produced by the students. According to the theory of cultural translation, any translation, even the wrong kind, is already a product of a very complicated process of interpretation that involves many cultural factors. With the analysis of these factors discovered in Korean college English reading classes, this thesis tries to explain the mechanisms through which wrong translations are produced, since these inevitably lead to wrong interpretations of given poetic texts.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
• /
• v.44
• /
• pp.87-121
• /
• 2016

Daehoon Ham's novel 'Cheongchunbo' features a studier as the main character who majored in Russian literature and admired the culture of the Soviet Union. From his viewpoint, the novel reproduces North Korean society before and after its independence from Japan. In this regard, it shows multilayered presence related to Russian culture and Soviet Russia. Such an aspect is based on the sense of sympathy that the main character has. The sense of sympathy is originated from the main character's admiration for the exoticism of Soviet culture which was forbidden during the late Japanese occupation. After Korea's independence from Japan, Russian was replaced by English. Such change also occurred in the main character's viewpoint. He underwent a change in his integrative viewpoint on Russian and Soviet under the name of Red Army. After defecting to South Korea, he began to put Russia down as a den possessed by the devil called 'communism.' In the meantime, Russia and Soviet have been separated from each other in ideological terms. The novel 'Cheongchunbo' stresses that the decisive cause of such changes is argued over trusteeship. The main character, fascinated by the presence of exotic Soviet, predicates that Soviet is a political symbol around the national division caused by the trusteeship. His change alluded to the life path of Korean authors who translated Russian literature after independence. During the Japanese occupation, Russian literature translated into Korea was a longing for forbiddance and admiration for Russia. However, the Russia presented in Daehoon Ham's novel before and after independence implies that the romantic translation has ended.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
• /
• v.53 no.2
• /
• pp.243-260
• /
• 2007

This article explores how Richard Powers' The Gold Bug Variations, an interdisciplinary novel through the new concepts of biocriticism and bioliterature is connected with literature/art and science/technology. Powers uses Edgar Allen Poe's "The Gold Bug" and Johann Sebastian Bach's "The Goldberg Variations" for decoding DNA in order to analogize a genomic metaphor. He imagines literature as "the book of life" genome, written by DNA code due to the complexity and multiplicity of the genome. His novel, as 'genomic narrative,' shows the articulation of the genomic reading, and expression in the life language through the discourses of the information technology and the rhetorical tropes in biology. New biological ideas are continually required to articulate these processes. In the present tendency of the Human Genome Project, such advanced devices as biocybernetics offer the potential to open up new possibilities to researching the complexity of the genome. This can only happen if the following two ideas are followed: One is to comply with advanced technologies for processing the rapidly increasing data of the genome sequence; The other is to admit the necessary paradigm shift in biology. As shown above, the complexity and multiplicity of the genomic reality is not so simple. We must go beyond determinism, even if representation of a biological reality reveals the possibility of expressing its constituent elements by the advanced biotechnology. Consequently, in the unstoppable advances of the art of decoding the genome, The Gold Bug Variations interrelates to the interdisciplinary approaches through the rhetorical tropes that unfold the complex discursive world of the genome. Powers shows that the complex mechanisms of the genome in the microworld of every cell as the plot of "the book of life" can be designed and written using DNA language. At the same time, his genomic reading and writing demonstrate the historical processes of the shifting center of new genomic development and polysemous interpretation.

• Journal of English Language & Literature
• /
• v.55 no.1
• /
• pp.107-128
• /
• 2009

Literature had been at center-stage in the traditional grammar-translation-focused English classrooms up to the mid-twentieth century. As the Audiolingual Method and the Communicative Language Teaching have gained popularity in the English classrooms, however, literature has receded into the background of English education. The main reasons for using literary texts in the English classrooms for communication-focused English instruction need to be examined. First of all, students can come in touch with the subtle and varied uses of language through literature-based teaching. They also feel close to certain characters in the literary work and share the emotional reponses with them. They get personally involved in the plot of the story. Universal human experience and cultural enrichment are two other merits which can be conferred on students by literary texts. Such linguistic and literary experiences can be significantly integrated into the literature-based instruction. More significantly, the four language skills (reading, writing, listening and speaking) can be combined with one another and integrated into a literature-focused curriculum for English education. The value of literary texts in the English classrooms can be clearly demonstrated by effective ways of using such texts as Charlotte's Web for integrated instruction. The full array of benefits that literature can bring to English instruction, however, has yet to be fully realized. These potentials need to be materialized into classroom practice.

• Sijohaknonchong
• /
• v.23
• /
• pp.33-48
• /
• 2005

In my paper, the discussion focuses on the fact that sijo is distinguished from free verse as a separate Identity in that it has its own formal beauty, and the works that deviate from this poetic rule are guarded against. In the past ancient sijo, in terms of both music and literature, was a major genre in harmony with chang(songs) ; and in modern times, sijo been created irrelevantly with chug. But my point is that it will not futile if sijo is accompanied with chang, and, therefore, the latter should be adjusted to a modern taste and go together with the former ; and that, to attain this goal, Korean musicans should cooperate with sijo writers. With English-version sijo works, there are some that are put in accordance with the formality of Engish poetry. This paper indicates that, in this case, foreign readers can't feel the nuances the source text of sijo works could produce, so it is not proper to translate sijo works in accordance with the formality of English poetry. But there are other translations where the 3-jang(statements)-6-gu(phrases) form of the original sijo text is reproduced within the limits of English expressions, with each of the two gu(phrases) in a ing(statement) having an almost equal number of syllables, so that each phrase could be recited within the same length of time. The conclusion is that the Korean-English translations of sijo works should begin with the reproduction of its original formal beauty; but, to do this, sijo writers should create works in accordance with it original formality first. Therefore for good translations of sijo works there should be a mutual efforts between sijo scholars and English poetry scholars.

• Cross-Cultural Studies
• /
• v.52
• /
• pp.371-392
• /
• 2018

Beginning with ethical nature inherent in the novel, this paper argues that ethical responsibility of $21^{st}$ century global fiction lies in its invitation to readers to rethink the status quo in a globalized world. While David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas and Min-gyu Park's Dinner with Buffett use international settings, these works exemplify how global fiction fails at, or succeeds in, the ethical task of challenging the contemporary world, respectively. This is because Mitchell's 500-page novel, although a felicitous embodiment of globalization and hybridity, does not challenge dominant ideologies and instead ends up reproducing a conventional humanist ideology against the backdrop of exotic places and diverting literary pastiches. In contrast, Dinner with Buffett, a novella about a Korean average Joe who wins a charity meal with tycoon Warren Buffett, perplexes the reader with counterintuitive turns and, in doing so, uncovers what we believe to be common sense today that serves global capitalism.