An investigation into the teaching of translation in South Korea

Abstract

This study examines the current trend and situation of translation in South Korea and seeks desirable ways for the development of translation for the government, translation graduate schools, and translation graduate students. It is assumed that the current curriculum and the current situation of the graduate schools need to be improved urgently. More precisely, my research has three main focuses: what constitutes the translation graduate schools in South Korea; what are the backgrounds of the translation graduate students; finally, how good the translation quality of Korean students is. For this study, I have conducted interviews with heads of translation departments at South Korea's graduate schools in the first place, with a view to establish the real situation of graduate schools that teach translation in South Korea. I also undertook a questionnaire research in order to obtain information on South Korea's translation students. The questionnaire has shed much light on the past and the present of the students. The main focus of this research is the assessment of translation students' work in South Korea. Here I have examined the translated texts of graduate students in South Korea by comparing the target texts with their two source texts. The corpus consists of two literary source texts and their translations. As a result, I have been able to successfully finish the data analysis that reveals the types of students' errors. I have adopted linguistically-oriented approaches to the assessment of the translation quality. To obtain statistics of translation students' errors, I used the qualitative method in the analysis of the source texts on one hand and the quantitative method through error analysis in the process of analysing target texts on the other. The results of the data analysis are discussed, and lastly an alternative curriculum for translation students and the ways for them to develop and improve their translation skills are presented. The results of this study can be summarised as two main elements for future translators in South Korea; the development of foreign language competence and the understanding of source language cultures. These findings have implications for realistic solutions to the translation errors of South Korea's translation students of graduate schools. As this study is one of the first attempts ever made in Korea, I hope more valuable studies and research projects will be made based on my thesis.