earticle

영어

Copyright protection is granted to reward artists and writers for their creative efforts. Therefore, creativity is the very foundation on which copyright is protected. In this age of the fourth industrial revolution, copyright of translated texts is an important issue for both users and developers of machine translation, since they need to secure translation data to enhance machine translation’s quality. Creativity is also important to human translators, as it is what they can differentiate themselves from machine translation. In recognition of such significance of translation’s creativity, this paper analyzes Korean court rulings on translation copyrights to understand how the courts assessed creative qualities of translated texts. The results show that the courts ruled that translated texts are creative, when the texts had substantial similarity with original texts, were produced with mental efforts exerted by translators, and showed creative qualities that were distinctive enough for the translated texts to be generally understood as being new and different from the source texts. Copyright laws have long been criticized in translation studies for treating translation as mere derivatives of original texts with limited originality or creativity. However, the findings of the study show that the Korean courts have applied clear criteria to determine whether translated texts are creative or not.