Government Translation In South Korea

Government Translation in South Korea: A Corpus-based Study is the first book to investigate and discuss translation processes and translation products in South Korean government institutions, employing a parallel corpus-based approach. Choi identifies different agents and procedures involved in institutional translation practices, discusses linguistic and genre features of translations, and investigates changes made in translations compared to the original documents, during the two Korean presidencies of Lee Myung-bak (2008–2013) and Park Geun-hye (2013–2017). Choi’s book explores important facets of Korean government translation in the belief that practices associated with the normative meaning and concept of government translation have to be displaced into the wider understanding of the concept of translation as a social construct. Drawing on the theoretical frameworks of institutional translation and critical discourse analysis–informed corpus-based translation studies, the chapters discuss the practice, process and products of Korean government translation. The Korean–English parallel corpus methodology used introduces a systemic way to analyse changes in Korean government translations, based on a personally built sentence-level tagged corpus, both qualitatively and quantitatively. This volume will be of great interest to scholars and students of translation studies as well as Korean studies.

The volume of economic, business, financial and institutional translation increases daily. Governments strive to produce plain and accessible information. Institutions and agencies operate in more than one language. Multinationals produce documents in multiple languages to expand their services worldwide, and large businesses and SMEs also have to adopt a multilingual approach for accessing new markets in new countries. Translation and interpreting training institutions are aware of the increasing need for training in this area. This awareness is evident in their curricula, which include subjects related to these areas of activity. Trainers and researchers are increasingly interested in knowing and researching the intricacies and aspects of this type of translation. This peer-reviewed publication, resulting from ICEBFIT 2016, echoes the voices of translation practitioners, researchers, and teachers, as well as other parties gathered to discuss new issues in institutional translation and business, finance and accounting translation, as well as, in a larger sense, specialized translation.

The focus of this volume is on how the people of the Korean Peninsula—historically an important part of the Sinocentric world in East Asia and today a vital economic and strategic site—have negotiated oral and written interactions with their Asian neighbors and Europeans in the past and present through the mediation of translators and interpreters. These encounters have been shaped by political, social, and cultural factors, including the shared use of the Chinese writing system in East Asia for many centuries, attitudes toward other Asians and Westerners, and perceptions of Korean identity in relation to these Others. After exploring aspects of historical interactions, the volume addresses how the role and practice of translation and interpreting have recently evolved as a result of the development of digital technology, an increase in the number of immigrants, and changes in political and cultural dynamics in the region. It covers a range of historical and contemporary aspects, genres, and venues that extend beyond the common yet restrictive focus on literary translation and includes discussions of translator training and academic studies of translation and interpreting in Korea.

Ideology has become increasingly central to work in translation studies. To date, however, most studies have focused on literary and religious texts, thus limiting wider understanding of how ideological clashes and encounters pervade any context where power inequalities are present. This special edition of The Translator deliberately focuses on ideology in the translation of a rich variety of lesser-studied genres, namely academic writing, cultural journals, legal and scientific texts, political interviews, advertisements, language policy and European Parliament discourse, in all of which translation as a social practice can be seen to shape, maintain and at times also resist and challenge the asymmetrical nature of exchanges between parties engaged in or subjected to hegemonic practices. The volume opens with two ground-breaking papers that investigate the nature and representation of truth and knowledge in the translation of the sciences, followed by two contributions which approach the issue of shifts in the translation of ideology from the standpoint of critical linguistics and critical discourse analysis, using data from political speeches and interviews and from English and Korean versions of Newsweek. Other contributions discuss the role that translation scholars can play in raising public awareness of the manipulative devices used in advertising; the way in which potentially competing institutional and individual ideologies are negotiated in the context of interpreting in the European Union; the role translation plays in shaping the politics of a multilingual nation state, with reference to Belgium; and the extent to which the concepts of norms and polysystems may be productive in investigating the link between translation and ideology, with reference to Chinese data.

This book examines the role of translation—the rendering of texts and ideas from one language to another, as both act and trope—in shaping attitudes toward nationalism and colonialism in Korean and Japanese intellectual discourse between the time of Japan’s annexation of Korea in 1910 and the passing of the colonial generation in the mid-1960s. Drawing on Korean and Japanese texts ranging from critical essays to short stories produced in the colonial and postcolonial periods, it analyzes the ways in which Japanese colonial and Korean nationalist discourse pivoted on such concepts as language, literature, and culture.

This book examines media coverage and public diplomacy regarding the North Korea nuclear controversy, with a focus on the history of military and diplomatic efforts to resolve tensions on the Korean Peninsula. Chapters consider both legacy and social media coverage in the United States, South Korea, Japan, and China, as well as the power of visual images and the role of military and hard power in shaping public understanding and events in the region.

This book examines how the South Korean state is able to execute national policies that are opposed to the interests of social constituents, despite the expansion of social power. The relationship between the government and big business provides an illuminating example of this. The author demonstrates how Confucian values, the role of the family and a firm hierarchical tradition have prevented South Korea from developing a modern state on the Western model.

This edited collection reflects on the development of Chinese corpus-based translation and interpreting studies while emphasising perspectives emerging from a region that has traditionally been given scant consideration in English-language dominated literature. Striking the balance between methodological and theoretical discussion on corpus-based empirical research into Chinese translation and interpreting studies, the chapters additionally introduce and examine a wide variety of case studies. The authors include up-to-date corpus-based research, and place emphasis on new perspectives such as sociology-informed approaches and cognitive translation studies. The book will be of interest to researchers and advanced students of translation/interpreting and contrastive linguistics studies, corpus linguistics, and Chinese linguistics.