As Korean literature gains wider international visibility, translation has become a crucial medium through which the historical and cultural contexts of Korean literary works are conveyed to foreign readers. This study examines the translation of cult...
As Korean literature gains wider international visibility, translation has become a crucial medium through which the historical and cultural contexts of Korean literary works are conveyed to foreign readers. This study examines the translation of culture-specific items (CSIs) in Yisang’s Wings(1936) across four English translations: Peter Lee(1990), Ahn(2001), Lew·Ryu(2005), and O’Rourke(2015).
Drawing on discussions of culture-specific items by Newmark, Franco Aixelá, Lee Geun-hee, and Kim Hyo-jung, this study defines CSIs as expressions associated with culturally specific objects, practices, historical experiences, or social contexts whose referential meanings and cultural implications are not directly shared by target-language readers. Idiomatic expressions, classical idioms, and figurative expressions without identifiable cultural referents were excluded from the dataset. A total of thirty-five CSIs were selected and classified into three categories: proper nouns, everyday-life cultural items, and sociocultural items. As each item was compared across four English translations, the analysis consisted of 140 CSI-translation instances.
The study adopts Franco Aixelá’s distinction between conservation and substitution as its primary framework for identifying how cultural markers are retained or adjusted in translation. CSI categories function as the primary basis for organizing and comparing the cases, while conservation and substitution are used to examine the translation patterns found within each category.
The findings show that Peter Lee(1990) and Ahn(2001) employ substitution strategies in 68.57% of the cases, whereas Lew·Ryu(2005) and O’Rourke(2015) show higher proportions of conservation, at 57.14% and 60%, respectively. These differences indicate that the four translations vary in the extent to which they retain or modify cultural markers in the target text. However, the same overall tendency does not necessarily lead to identical treatment of individual CSIs, as translation choices differ according to the type and context of each item.
This study contributes to research on Korean modern literature in translation by comparing the treatment of CSIs across multiple English translations of a single literary work. It also suggests that publication period, publication format, intended readership, and broader publication context should be considered as contextual factors in interpreting variations in translation strategies.