Shoot the translator!

As a translator, I sympathize with other translators, and I know I make mistakes — big and small — all the time. But mistranslations like the one of Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon’s comments on the Korea-U.S. alliance that appeared in today’s Korea Herald are really, really inexcusable — there are enough issues between the U.S. and Korea right now as it is without a shoddy translation causing even more misunderstandings. See the comments to Andy’s post to get a clearer picture of what was said.

This entry was written by Robert Koehler, posted on November 12, 2004 at 3:09 am, filed under ROK-US Issues. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post. Trackbacks are closed, but you can post a comment.

7 Comments

  1. Horace Jeffery Hodges your flag
    Posted November 12, 2004 at 3:53 am | Permalink

    I noticed this, too, when I read yesterday’s Korea Herald. “Alliances?” I thought, then immediately dismissed the term as a mistranslation. It’s good to see that my dismissal was justified.

    Jeffery Hodges

  2. BigFire your flag
    Posted November 12, 2004 at 5:44 am | Permalink

    Reminds me of an ’80s short movie call “The Translator” in which the translator in a US-Soviet arms negotation meeting went out of his way to mistranslate everything. (Everything is in English, the Russian are merely accented English). At the end of the movie, the US and Soviet representative are ready to kill each other.

  3. robertneff103 your flag
    Posted November 12, 2004 at 4:53 pm | Permalink

    Yes, this case seems like the translator really stepped on it. Unfortunately translators are blamed for a lot of things that they are not responsible for. There are several instances in my period of interest (late Choson) that the translators were used as scape-goats. One such instance was when King Kojong severely punished the translator for the Korean Customs’ Service when they (Korean Government) tried to remove McLeavy Brown from controlling the Korean finances. I guess King Kojong realized that there was going to be some trouble when the British fleet, consisting 9 warships, suddenly appeared in the Chemulpo harbor. He needed someone to blame and claimed that the translator had mistranslated and caused the trouble.

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