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영어

This paper starts with a question: what is background knowledge in translation? Even though its importance has been emphasized in various studies, the scope or elements of background knowledge remains vague. To take one step to the concept of background knowledge, this paper focuses on a translation process and analyzes the decision-making process of a translator in non-linguistic areas. In translating 『The Biblical World - An Illustrated Atlas』(2007, National Geographic Society) from English into Korean the translator had to choose a Korean bible out of six versions for translating biblical quotes; deal with incorrect quote sources given in the English text; search concepts and information in the fields of biblical studies, geography, history, archeology etc.; convert imperial unit system of measures and weights into metric unit system. Tentative conclusion of this study is as follows: background knowledge includes the knowledge about readers' background knowledge; background knowledge may be information cumulated continuously in the process of translation rather than knowledge entity prepared in advance.