Translating Korean relative clauses
Ahhh, Korean prose. It’s so amazingly different from its English counterpart.
All posts filed under: Translation/번역
Interview with Park Yoochun (Marie Claire 2015)
Given that I know zilch about what’s happening in Korean entertainment these days, it came as a mild surprise to learn that Park Yoochun (of K-drama & K-pop fame) is off to serve his mandatory two-year military service. Very soon in fact. Like, today. Or yesterday. I chanced upon this short interview while scanning Korean celeb magazines for quality reading content and – well, normally I’m rather indifferent to Yoochun but sentimentality got the better of me. I’d just resumed reading 셩균관 유생들의 나날 for the umpteenth time, which got me thinking about Sungkyunkwan Scandal, (still one of my favorite dramas to date, by the way), which made me think about JYJ and DBSK and OT5 4ever, etc. etc. I found this interview pretty funny actually because the interviewer/writer can’t start a single question without talking about how PYC is going to be gone for TWO YEARS – it’s like s/he is so desperate for Yoochun to talk about how crushed he’s going to be to give up the spotlight, but Chunnie’s having none of that. Full translated interview under the …
Interview with Lee Jin-wook and Jo Yoon-hee (Marie Claire)
I consider 나인: 아홉 번의 시간 여행 (Nine: Nine Time Travels) to be the Korean drama to end all Korean dramas for me. In a good way. It’s not my all-time favorite drama, but it hit me in a way that no K-drama since has been able to. In fact, I don’t think I’ve managed to finish a single Korean drama since watching Nine – as if I’ve been cursed by the magical Himalayan incense myself! About a year ago, there was news that Nine would be remade for an American audience which made me simultaneously roll my eyes and perk up my ears. If it ever came into fruition, I love the story line and the questions it raises enough to consider watching it. Cautiously. Anyway, this is an old piece came that out in the April 2013 edition of Marie Claire Korea, right when Nine had started to air that I translated on a whim last night. If you’re looking for something mind-bending, thrilling, heartbreaking, and suspenseful all at once, I highly recommend Nine – just sit tight …
악동뮤지션 (AKMU) – 안녕
Let me tell you a story about myself. When I was growing up, I moved a lot. By the time I graduated high school, I had lived in five different states and changed schools just as many times. When I got older, the moves got much harder. At one point, I remember making the mental decision to just not make friends – what was the point if I was just going to move away after a couple years? I moved to North Carolina in the middle of seventh grade and, day after day, I remember vividly eating lunch alone at one end of a lunch table in the corner of the cafeteria. There was a group of girls who sat a little bit further down from me that I recognized from some of my classes. I would glance at occasionally because they seemed friendly but I didn’t approach them or say anything for weeks. And then one day, a girl from that group approached me and said, “Do you want to sit with us?” And I did. …
Interview with Jo Jung-seok (Singles)
Any fans of The King 2 Hearts’ heart-melting, swooniest of swoony, squeal-worthy Eun Shi-kyung out there? I’ve been keeping an eye on actor Jo Jung-seok since I first saw him What’s Up, where he plays a nerdy kid with a great voice but terrible stage fright; all I can say at this point is GIMME MOAR. Jo’s actually a well-known name in musical theater, but this year he found his way into the the realm of TV and film and I can only hope he has plans to stay. I came across his interview in Singles magazine last month and wanted to have another go at translating longer articles, so here goes. (Disclaimer: All copyright belongs to the original writer. I’m not profiting by this translation and I can’t guarantee its accuracy.) Look! At! That! Face!
東方神起 – 忘れないで 한국어 번역
TVXQ’s 忘れないで (“Don’t Forget”) is one of my favorite songs ever by the first K-pop group I ever liked (*sob*) and now… I’ve tried to translate it into Korean!! My Japanese is deplorable so looking up every single grammar point and vocabulary word I didn’t know was time consuming, but in the end I managed to get a sense of what the song was about. Please be warned, this translation was only for practice. I still have a long way to go before my Japanese (and Korean, too, for that matter) is good enough to provide a decent translation. After I did my translation, I compared it to one I found online and I was surprised to see that a lot of the lines matched! That sure raised my confidence in understanding Japanese and writing Korean. Video below and lyrics after the break.^^ video credit: s3adolphin
Translation Challenges
While tumblr is having another meltdown, I thought I should write another semi-intelligent post over here on wordpress, instead of spazzing about CNBLUE, BIGBANG, and SHINee. I’m not an expert on translation nor am I really at the level where I can translate something with confidence. But I do think it’s a good way to expose yourself to the language you’re learning, at least at the level of vocabulary and grammar. In that aspect, I feel as if I have progressed somewhat in Korean, though not as fast as I would have liked. It’s been about 1.5 years since I started teaching myself Korean and now I can usually understand about 85% of almost any Korean pop song on the first listen, 95% if I look at the lyrics. (Falsettos and hardcore raps still trip me up though). I used to do a lot of K-pop “translations” (basically looking up every word/grammar pattern I didn’t know and re-writing the song in English) but now I don’t feel the need to do it as much anymore since I …
Interview with Jung Il Woo (Marie Claire)
Since I’m kind of obsessed with 49 Days‘ sassy Scheduler, I wanted to try my hand at translating an article about Jung Il Woo that I found in the April 2011 issue of Marie Claire Korea. Well, clearly I bit off more than I could chew. This was my first time attempting to read (and translate) a rather lengthy magazine article and I think I got the gist of it but there were A LOT of words I did not know. I would say I had to look up about 10-15% of the words (around 170 words out of a total of 1200). I would say I’m about 65-70% percent confident in my translation. There were many things I was unsure of and probably could have phrased better… but this is only for my own personal practice. Again, I cannot guarantee the accuracy of this translation.
Learning Korean Through Translation
I’m a huge proponent of learning a language through translation. In fact, most of the vocabulary and grammar structures I know now are thanks to my attempts to learn Korean by “translating” K-pop songs. Not only did I learn new things, I also figured out what the song meant! But, please note, these are all still amateur translations. A successful translation captures both the meaning and style of a work and if you use translation as a means to learn a language, you can only hope to master one aspect at the beginner level (meaning). Once you’ve mastered the language (if there is such a thing), you can learn to capture the style of the original work as well.
