earticle

영어

Pygmalion, written by George Bernard Shaw in 1912, adopts the well-known Greek myth, which deals with love between Cyprus King Pygmalion and his statue Galatea. In Pygmalion, instead of King and his statue, Dr. Higgins and a flower girl Eliza appear to represent extremely different classes. In particular, Higgins as a phonetician emphasizes the importance of English language being properly taught.
In this vein, he bet he can change her kerbstone language within three months. As an element of capitals, language use is indispensably connected with one's social class. Thus language matters.
According to Pierre Bourdieu, habitus has three capitals: social, economic and cultural. Among them, one's language use, as a cultural capital, is deeply and inseparably related to show one’s social class. This kind of social class exposes one's habitus which is combined with the three capitals. Eliza cannot equip with any capitals mentioned above; however, after language learning and practice from Higgins, finally she can be misidentified as a Hungarian princess at a party.
What are interesting and important are how translators produce Eliza's expressions and to what extent translators' visibility can be achieved. For analysis, three Korean translations are examined. They are translated by professors whose majors were English drama, not by professional translators.
Translating plays requires that to what extent translators can transfer stage language expressions into daily ones practised in everyday life, rather than to reach modest equivalence. Interestingly, in translating Eliza's language as a flower girl three translators adopt a peculiar dialect which is mainly used in Chungcheong Province.
The reason is that the dialect sounds neutral and can deviate some provincial milieu. Among three translations, TT2 shows a little confusion in adopting a couple of different dialects when translating Eliza's words. In comparison with three translations, TT3 shows the most faithful and readable sentences in Eliza's lines so that TT3 can be acknowledged to be appropriate for the stage language by acquiring readability.