Rebecca Wittke
Gramling – HNRS 400
09. April 2012
번역하는 너무 어려워요
Translation is certainly harder than it sounds. At first, one tends to think something like, “Yeah, I
can understand it when I read it. So I just have to convey what I’m getting out of it and it’s all done. Easy
as pie.” Not so. One has to be fairly fluent in both languages to effectively translate something with a
relative amount of ease. And even if one has a high level of fluency, they still have to make executive
decisions between possible translations of text and speech. Would it be better said one way or the other?
Is it more important to maintain the feeling or the intention of the text?
The farther from fluency one is, the longer and more arduous the task becomes. As a second
year learner of Korean, I feel that the undertaking of translating Korean text into English might be more
than I can handle. In order to really convey the meaning of the song, I should have more experience with
it.
Instead I find myself frequently confused by multiple aspects of the translation process. First:
the words. Ever language has many words, nouns, verbs, function words. I, of course, don’t know all of
them and find myself befriending various online translators. After I get down what all of the words mean,
the next part comes in: putting them together. This is easily the most ärgerlich part of the process for
me. Why? Korean word order. In theory, Korean is an SOV language. However, Korean is much like
German in that words can be identified with a certain case or purpose. Korean does this with particles.
They will be the death of me.
Sure, sometimes it’s easy enough. 을/를 identifies direct objects; 에/에서 are locative particles
that tells the reader when or where something happened; 이/가 tells the reader what the subject is. But
there are other particles. Like 은/는. This is known as the ‘topic particle.’ English doesn’t tend to identify
the topics of sentences, making this concept deceptively confusing. Then to top it all off, this unfamiliar
concept is sprinkled amongst the more familiar aspects of the sentence, creating complexity that
translators of my caliber can only hope to really understand.
Another thing that is difficult when it comes to translation is idioms and other phrases that are
not to be translated literally. Take, for example, a line of text from the song Tomorrow : 비온 뒤에 땅이
굳는다는. I chose to translate this as “there is calm after the storm.” The line literally translates to
something more like, “Behind the rain the earth hardens. I chose to not translate this literally, but rather
go for what I thought the intention of the line was. After the ground is upset by a storm, it eventually
sets and returns to its previous state. This translation is then supported by the next line: 너와의
근심보다 답답한 안심일 테니. Relaxation will be more suffocating than anxieties with you. The artist
acknowledges that while the calm after the storm might be a good thing for many people, a time of
relaxation it would not be good for him. He so cherished time with his lover that even the hard times
that they struggled through are preferable to the empty time spent alone after she is gone.
This untranslatability due to a lack of exact matched meaning appears in other songs as well. For
example, the song 집 contains these lines: 헌신발이 될까만 겁이나 (I’m afraid I’ll only become an old
shoe). 세상, 세월, 사람 날 꺾어 신어서 (Abused by the world, time, and the person wearing it). 꺾어요
means ‘to break’ while 신어요 is ‘to wear.’ When these two words are put together as they appear in
the text, it describes when one improperly wears a shoe, shoving their foot into it without bothering to
ensure that their entire foot is inside. This folding over the back of the shoe under one’s weight is 꺾어
신어서. However, the words preceding this idiom are sort of strange. 세상 (world), 세월 (time), 사람
(person). Obviously only the person can wear the shoe and thus abuse it so. However, it would appear
that both the world and time are also functioning as agents.