What, the Korea Times is learning just now that the English signposts in front of tourist sites often contain errors?
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Another reason to learn Korean
This entry was written by Robert Koehler, posted on May 10, 2006 at 10:02 am, filed under Korean Culture. Bookmark the permalink. Follow any comments here with the RSS feed for this post.
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11 Comments
Apart from errors (although I’d say in my experience they’re not really all that common on the info signs at tourist spots), sometimes there’s just more information in Korean, that doesn’t get translated into English. Very occasionally, however, it works the other way: I’ve been to one site where the building’s history in English was actually more detailed than its history in Korean. A rarity, that was.
What a joke. The KT should maybe try not to put out a newspaper with hundreds of misspelled words in every edition before it tackles tourist signs. Even so, it runs stories like this every year, and of course nothing ever changes, possibly because no one gives a rat’s ass what the KT has to say.
Oh, I should have read the article fully. The author’s main complaint was in fact the lack of info. I guess the people who wrote the copy were thinking along the old line, “Oh, foreigners don’t need to know that. Let’s not worry their pretty little heads with boring details.”
Yeah it’s always bothered me that the English explanations are always about 20% of the length of the Korean. I dont’ care about the broken English so much as the lack of details.
I am not so sure that a lot of them are complete omissions…others more skilled in the language than I could perhaps help me out a little bit…but here is what I have picked up in a nutshell…
Formal Korean writing would appear to have much more rhetoric than the translations. My first experience with this was many years ago at a friends wedding. He asked a fully bilingual Korean friend to translate the Korean into English and speak it at the wedding. The groom to be was quite perplexed as the translation was less than half the length of the original Korean. Our friend swore up and down it was pretty much complete in all the important details.
It was also somewhat evident from assessment writing samples - lots of needless information that, while not completely irrelevant, did nothing to really support the topic.
So once again, perhaps some of the differences in length could be attributed to something as simple as writing style. It would seem as though English can often take a more direct approach (relax people…no value judgement here). I am not, however, discounting the probability that information is often omitted as well.
Once again, no science nor research, just casual observations with a very limited sample size.
The problem of missing words works both ways too. A friend who does English proofreading for his university’s translation center often faces this problem. In one case, it seems that a certain big Korean company, say company H, submitted a document containing 15,000 Korean words. After the word for word translation by the students in the translation center, there were about 15,000 English words. Only problem, it was incomprehensible English, bordering on Babelfish quality. His efforts to render the document comprehensible resulted in the loss of about 4,000 words, as many ideas were repeated again and again. Company H was NOT pleased seeing as they submitted a document containing 15,000 in Korean and felt shortchanged that they received a document containing ONLY 11,000 words in English. My friend was asked to insert the missing words by the head of the language center, himself a translation ‘expert’, in order to please Company H and facilitate payment.
By what I read on the title of his threads lately, I think he’s promoting something.
The Goat and Moosehead:
You do raise a valid point. But I was thinking not so much of rhetorical differences—which I agree are there, when comparing the two languages—but actual items of information. I can read the Korean, and see this king or that year mentioned in the place’s history, but then the English version omits aforementioned monarch, date, etc. In the one counterexample I found, there was more detailed information in English on the various fires the wooden building had undergone than in the Korean version.
Moosehead, that’s funny and very interesting. Luckily, the companies my small company translates for have never asked us to match word counts, but I often complain about how much repetition, fluff and outright bs is included in the stuff we are given. Probably nearly half of many reports is essentially filler.
Yo Marmot dude, however many errors there are in Engris, there are often just as many in Korean, right? But I do agree with Sewing, that the Korean is often more informative.
Warning: This is not a thread-jack.
Funny, I only hear Japanese folks saying Engris. Perhaps the Marmot dude can better clarify….
Just glad that there isn’t a lack in pretentious tools since I’ve left. Thanks for the heads-up oranckay.