지자체 홈페이지의 번역전략에 관한 연구

A Study on Translation Strategies in Local Government's Website

This paper examines culture and tourism-related texts translated from Korean into Japanese in the Japanese version of the official website of Busan Metropolitan City, as of May 2011. Even though websites provided in foreign languages are expected to attract more and more visitors, further strengthening their status as important vehicles through which to provide local cultural information, not enough attention has been paid to the monitoring of the quality of these translations. Against this backdrop, this paper focuses mainly on culture-specific items translated from Korean into Japanese in culture and tourism-related texts from the website, in order to determine which translation strategies were adopted by the translators by classifying the translations as foreignizating or domesticating translations. Through study of the major characteristics of these translated texts, based on the Skopos theory which places greatest emphasis on the intended purpose of a translation, this paper also discusses which translation strategy might be most efficient in maximizing readability for the target readers. The research has found a total of 60 culture-specific items in the translations, of which 34 words were translated with a domestication strategy, 17 words adopted a foreignization strategy and 9 words were translated using both strategies. These statistics clearly show that domesticating translation was the dominant approach taken in Korean-Japanese translations posted on Busan Metropolitan City's official website. Each translation strategy has its merits and demerits, but given that the underlying purpose of this website is to convey information clearly, the best translation would be the one that takes into consideration readability for the target audience, while preserving the unique characteristics of the source culture. Translation strategies that implement both a domestication and foreignization strategy at the same time, therefore, are likely to be those best suited to the translation of culture-specific texts.