Korean Job Discussion Forums

[World Traveler]

[El Bandito]

As stated by Mr. Lee of the Korean Literary Society, "If foreigners want to read Korean books, they should learn Korean!"

[jvalmer]

[edwardcatflap]

I think there are a few issues here. It's very difficult to translate literature, as jvalmer says, due to language differences, cultural differences and artisitc integrity. Sometimes you have to re-write whole sentences with completely different structures in order to make them sound native speaker like. Otherwise you get books that just read like a translation from page one and no one wants to read them. I know from experience helping to translate film scripts that artists are incredibly precious about their work and often think they know better.

Having said that. I've read books translated from Japanese and found the English to be perfect - just some of the culture can still be confusing. Mind you the kind of books that would get translated from Japanese/Korean would have to be those with international appeal e.g. Detective stories, not books about what it's like to be Korean which a lot of those from here seem to be about.

[Jake_Kim]

Poems are always a good example of 'lost in translation' argument, but it's more than linguistic differences that becomes obstacles to good translation.
Unless the text is somewhat completely factual, say, a technical manual for a machine - tangible, whose characteristics don't change by crossing the borders - usually the works of literature could contain so much assumed knoweldge, historic and contemporary, that are so natural to the native speakers of the language but not so much to others.
Of course, that goes both ways. Nevertheless, the literate mass in the East (take Korea or Japan, for example) are exposed to the translated texts and other cultural elements of the West throughout their lives, so they can form certain mental image of those elements even if its equivalents don't exist in their own country.
The vice versa can't really be said of the mass in the West, can it? Then the text translated from Korean will have to be inundated with extra footnotes explaining what each element is, or do without and leave the readers perplexed or misunderstood, unless the original Korean text deals with the narrowest and the most 'universal' theme and settings in the first place so that you get it straight away just because you're also a human being.

[Squire]

I don't think there's a market for books describing how busy and tired the author is, and how cold they are too.

[Ginormousaurus]