한국 고전소설의 한영 번역 연구

Cultural Elements in Korean-English Translation of the Korean Classical Literature

The purpose of this paper is to examine how important cultural elements are in the translation of Korean classical literature. The Korean language is characterized as a high context-culture language while the English language is characterized as a low context-culture language. The difference between the two has given a lot of difficulties to translators when the cultural elements in literary texts are translated. The meanings of culture-specific items cannot be understood fully by target text readers because they don’t have prior knowledge and experience for the source culture. Therefore, the translator are required to be a mediator who enables source and target text readers to share the cultural background. This paper has investigated six translations of Korean classical literature, which contain a lot of cultural elements, as the bases for the analysis of translation patterns. The result of this study has been summarized as follows. Firstly, the cultural elements of source text have been translated into the target text by four translation patterns, such as generalization, specification, localization and emprunt. Each has its strong and weak point as well as its unique characteristic. In most cases, the meaning of cultural elements has been successfully delivered but some high contextual information in Korean culture cannot be fully translated into English. Accordingly, the deeper analyses about the translation of these cultural elements are urgently needed.