earticle

영어

Interpreting President Trump’s remarks live on TV can pose unique challenges as his use of language is notably characterized by a level of formality deemed too low for a president. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether Trump’s remarks at the US-North Korea summit press conference also lacked formality and if so, how the interpreters bridged the gap between the formality of his remarks and the Korean viewers’ expectations. Using WordSmith Tools and MS Word’s readability statistics, the study first analyzed the level of formality of Trump’s remarks by comparing it with those of his two predecessors, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, based on four criteria: use of context-dependent simple structure, unnecessary repetition, incomplete sentences, and fillers. It then compared Trump’s remarks with six paired Korean interpreters’ renditions to identify and categorize the strategies they employed to enhance the formality of the interpreted remarks. It found that three strategies -- preservation, addition, and deletion -- were used in varying proportions, which helped improve formality.