earticle

영어

This case study intends to investigate the characteristics of the evaluation of literary translation practiced in the form of translation awards and translation grants in the U.S. While traditional approaches to literary translation evaluation have been often bound by the prescriptive factors of faithfulness and readability, which could neglect the practical importance of publishability and other non-textual elements, this study rather takes a descriptive approach to reviewing and analyzing prize-awarded translations and translators and aims to discover common elements shared by these award-winning translations and translators. With the descriptive approach, this study has found that not only the translation quality but also critical factors outside translation text itself, including the overall backgrounds of translators, expertise of evaluators, influence of publishers, play a pivotal role in the evaluation of literary translation. The study has also discovered the important role of the accurate analysis of source texts in translation evaluation, and emphasizes the necessity that multi-layered direct and indirect evaluations by evaluators as well as editors and publishers contribute to bridging the gap between the result of literary translation evaluation and the actual reception and publication in the U.S. publishing markets, overcoming the limitation of numeric and mechanical results on the evaluation sheet.