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