Abstract
Children’s literature invariably reflects the views of adults. Likewise, what they think is desirable or not for children is also reflected in children’s literature translations. Yet adult assumptions, or ideology, may not always be in line with how children actually respond. This paper delves into this issue of ideology in terms of character name translation in Japanese picturebooks translated into Korean. While the majority of source text names are retained in English-to-Korean translations through transliteration, they are often changed into Korean names in Japanese-to-Korean translations. Interviews and an online questionnaire survey were conducted with Korean adult readers to find out how they respond to such differences, followed by an experiment with Korean children to see whether what adults think, revealed through the interviews and a survey, is consistent with how children actually respond. This paper hopes to shed light on how adult ideology affects children’s book translation, and how this can sometimes be misleading to children.
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Notes
The year 2009 is mentioned here because Korean age reckoning is different from the western system. Those born in 2009 all have the same age based on the Korean reckoning and thus are in one class.
Korean language title: 순이와 어린 동생. ST title: Asae and Her Little Sister, あさえとちいさいいもうと.
Korean language title: 우리 친구하자. ST title: とんことり.
DongaIlbo (Korean vernacular newspaper), May 2, 2009. http://news.donga.com/List/Series_70070000000015/3/70070000000015/20090502/8727383/1) [Accessed March 1, 2013].
A paired t test compares two samples in cases where each value in one sample has a natural partner in the other.
http://www.mogef.go.kr/korea/view/policy/policy02_05a.jsp?func=view&idx=691668. The statistics of 2014 are not yet available.
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This research was funded by Hankuk University of Foreign Studies research fund of 2015, Korea.
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Sung, SE., Park, SJ. & Kim, K. Why not Japanese names? Reader response to character name translation. Neohelicon 43, 213–231 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-015-0311-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11059-015-0311-z