[KS] A couple of inquiries re Korean literature

[Y Jones]

Dear Brother Anthony,

Thank you for your reply. I do appreciate your help, and I think you can
safely assume that I (or most of the list members) am painfully aware of
issues concerning translation, such as the issue of target language,
assimilation, dynamic equivalence, or here, as you called it here
"domestication."

Without going into much detail, the word 옹 (Ong) appears in a shortstory. It
appears independently as a title, such as 옹은 천천히 걸어갔다 (*Ongŭn ch’ŏnch’ŏni kŏ
rŏgatta*), much like 사장님은 천천히 걸어갔다. (*Sajangnimŭn ch’ŏnch’ŏni kŏrŏgatta*).
I'm not sure whether the *han'gŭl* or the MR diacrtic marks will be
expressed correctly in my target language (internet).

I also appreciate your help re publication of literary works. I am aware of
Azalea, and am a little bit surprised that Azalea would be the only one
worth mentioning.

Respectfully,


Jones


2009년 5월 24일 (일) 오전 6:10, Brother Anthony <ansonjae at sogang.ac.kr>님의 말:

> 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/
>
>
>
>
>
>
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