earticle

영어

Decades ago, people who wanted to read cartoons had only two choices: buying comic books at a bookstore or going to Manwhabangi. But these days it seems people have another choice that has become the most popular one over time with spread of the internet. The Korean web portal Daum created a webtooniiservice and later followed by Naver with the launch of Naver Webtoon in 2004. These services regularly release webtoons that are available for free. For now comics account for a quarter of all book sales in South Korea, while more than 3 million Korean users paid to access online manwha and 10 million users read free webtoons. Since 2010s, services such as Lezhin Comics, TappyToon, Spottoon, Tapas and Line Webtoons have begun to officially translate webtoons into English. In recent years, these webtoons have been gaining popularity in Western markets, rivaling Japanese manga. Naver’s Line Webtoon service, launched in 2014, is now the biggest webtoon platform in Korea. The free Line Webtoon translation service has allowed webtoons to form part of the global Korean Wave. Amid the increasing popularity of Korean webtoons abroad, this study illustrates the translation strategies adopted in translating Naver webtoons into Line webtoons, focusing on the slangs, vulgar language words and culture specific items used in the webtoons. About more than 180 Naver webtoons, top ranking 5 webtoons and their Line translations as of July, 2018 are analyzed. Among the Line webtoon translations, some of them were generated from free fan translations, so this research also find out any differences between the official translations and fan translations of Line webtoons. The study highlights how the genre-specific elements are translated into English which encompasses from slangs to everyday dialogues.