By Chung Hye-jean
Staff Reporter

Last November, President Kim Dae-jung satisfied the long-cherished wish of many Koreans by becoming the first Korean to receive the Nobel Peace Prize. Koreans were elated in the hope that this prize would be the first of many to follow.

Among other categories, Nobel Prize in Literature seems to be the closest, hovering just out of our reach. Until now, several Korean writers were nominated for the prize; Choi In-hoon was one of them.

However, Park Won, 64, a professor of the Department of English Language Education at Inha University in Inchon, who is also the Dean of the College of Education, thinks that the time is still not ripe yet.

"Although the possibility of receiving a Nobel Prize for Literature seems to be growing stronger, especially since we received the Nobel Peace Prize, we still have a long way to go before we can hold the prize in our grasp," he said. "First of all, we have to translate our literature into Western languages, so the judges and the readers from the Western culture can read it."

Schools that specialize in cultivating translation professionals are now mushrooming in Korea. There are interpretation and translation courses at universities such as Ewha Womans University, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies and Kyung Hee University. Also, the Korea Association of Translation Studies was founded by professors and translators last year, with the purpose of establishing translation studies.

Prof. Park continued by saying, "There are also private institutes that teach translation. But they mostly teach skills needed in business or tourism industry. Translation for literature has to be a level higher than that.

"There are two kinds of translations: inbound translating, which is translating a foreign language into Korean and outbound translating, which is translating Korean into a foreign language. These two have to go together as one."

"Though there have been some mistranslations and mistakes, for the most part, we have done inbound translating reasonably well for quite some time," said Park. "However, there has been a lack in outbound translating till now."

Prof. Park added that Korea was too far behind compared to other countries when it came to translating our literature into other languages. He presumed that one of the reasons universities are newly forming translation courses is to solve this dilemma. But the professor accentuated that this was not a problem that could be solved overnight.

"Translating Korean into Western languages is especially hard because the fundamental structure is so different from ours," he said. "You must receive intensive training to develop the necessary skills. Most Korean novels translated up until now were done by foreign people who knew the Korean language well. For instance, ?he Land [a famous Korean novel by Park Kyung-ree] was translated into French by a French person."

Stressing the difficulty in cultivating translation experts, he suggested that we learn from the Japanese model. "Just as musicians are taught to play an instrument when they are very young, the Japanese pick talented youngsters and send them to study in foreign countries for long periods of time, so that they can absorb the culture," Park said. "But in Korea, until recently, we didn? have an established school or a program to train professional translators, nor were there any financial support from the government.

"We can? just wait for a translation expert to simply pop out from nowhere someday. If we want to rear an excellent translator, we have to concentrate on training young talents into an elite force in a professional, focused environment," he emphasized.

Prof. Park also proposed using second and third generation Koreans living overseas as translators. But in this case, he asserted the importance of the overseas residents fluency in Korean, their ability to appreciate the in-depth structure and profound nuances of the Korea language, as well as their knowledge of the native Korea culture.

"Especially, in order to receive an international prize such as the Nobel prize, the competing novel should have a strong smell of soybean paste stew and kimchi stew, using our native culture as material," he said.

He reiterated the difficulty in translating our literature by citing an example: "For instance, in the novel that I mentioned before, Park Kyung-ree? ?he Land, some part don? have a good translation equivalent in a foreign language. You could link words to show the gist of the flow of the story, but it is very difficult to translate the human nature common to all Koreans, such as ?an’ (roughly translated to ? bitter grief) that flows beneath the surface."

Elaborating on the amount of effort it takes simply to find words that fit, Prof. Park explained that although "han" courses through many Korean stories, this Korean word does not have a equivalent in foreign languages.

"The traditions, history and mentality of a culture are all blended in a literary work. So if a translator does not have transcendental knowledge, that is, a schema of that culture, it becomes just a word-for-word translation that lacks life and human appeal? machine translation," he said. "It may be able to convey information, but it cannot touch someone? heart."


Prof. Park received his bachelor’s and master’s degree at the English Department
of Seoul National University and his doctorate degree in English Language Education at the University of the Philippines in Manila. He has also taught Korean studies course at Yonsei University.