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영어

Obituaries are usually written for public figures in foreign news media, but ordinary citizens are remembered too in paid obituaries by their family members or friends. In South Korea, people who make the obituary pages are those who are famous or those who have notable title(s) and/or achievements. Ordinary people's names can be on the death notices page if they have son(s) or daughter(s) (or sons-in- law/daughters-in-law) who have a name or position that means something in the community. This study compares English news media's obituaries and Korean media's English obituaries. In a corpus analysis of the former South Korean president Kim Dae- jung's obituaries, the obituary by a Korean magazine stood out in its lexical choices while English media's obituaries showed a strong homogeneity. In another comparison of obituaries by two English Newspapers in Korea (the Korea Times and the Korea JoongAng Daily) and the JoongAng Ilbo, the Korea Times emphasized what the deceased had accomplished over her values and personality that moved people's hearts. Obituary readers in the English world, a sizable number of people, expect to see lives worth remembering in the obituary pages and there they can see what kind of values are cherished in their society. These values are reinforced as qualities required of an ideal citizen. Therefore, when writing English obituaries, these expectations and conventions should be respected. An obituary is not a chronicle of the deceased's achievements but a “commemoration” of a life well-lived. It is hoped that this study will help those in Korea's English news media write obituaries that can be well-received by foreign readers. Also, it will be worthwhile to see this study contribute to furthering studies on obituary writing in Korean.