[KS] A couple of inquiries re Korean literature

[Brother Anthony]

The question is disconcerting because I think it should be obvious to a translator that no word like this can be 'translated' in isolation. Everything depends on the context, what the sentence and paragraph say, what kind of work it occurs in, what the tone is, what function the word has in that context, whether it has to be represented at all . . .

The Korean language is full of words that have no 'exact equivalent' in English, and when a text was written several decades back or seeks to represent an earlier stage of Korean culture, the number of such words is soon overwhelming. It is, of course, a mistake to believe that every such word has to be 'exactly' translated, or indeed translated at all. So much depends on the intended readership for the translation and the editorial options made by the publishers. 

We are all familiar with the strong current of 'domestication'  that has for a long time characterized literary translation in the English-speaking world, especially. In that perspective, the question of 'how to translate 웅' is not even a question. 'Make it sound American / familiar' is the rule of the game. Recent protests from source language critics at the erasure of the original culture in such an approach has led to a revaluation of a 'foreignizing' approach, by which a word such as 웅 should not be lightly left untranslated, but that does not mean that there is any one obvious solution as to how to find an 'adequate equivalent.'

Modesty prevents me from pointing to various articles in which I have discussed this kind of issue. The section of paper about Korean literature in   http://hompi.sogang.ac.kr/anthony/Articles.htm  might lead somewhere.

The obvious journal for publishing translations is Harvard's Azalea http://www.uhpress.hawaii.edu/journals/azalea 

Brother Anthony
Sogang University, Seoul
http://hompi.sogang.ac.kr/anthony/