earticle

영어

While the literary world has largely discontinued the practice of relay translating French to Korean, the Korean subtitles for most French films are still translated through English. This paper aims to analyze the impacts of this relay translation through a contrastive analysis of the original French version of Intouchables with its subtitled versions in Korean and in English. Intouchables (2011) tells the story of an unexpected friendship between two men coming from diametrically opposed worlds. Philippe is a rich, uptight, intellectual, white aristocrat who is left quadriplegic by a paragliding accident, and Driss is a poor, exuberant, ex-convict black immigrant from Senegal who becomes Philippe’s caretaker. While Driss helps Philippe rediscover the joy of living, he learns the values of a world other than the ghetto. The translation challenge here is to recreate the effects of a high comedy and feel-good movie. The task presents numerous difficulties, including the translation of humorous expressions, cultural references, sociolects, and ideologies. Relay translation undoubtedly involves some intrinsic limitations. However, as part of a foreignizing method to respect verisimilitude, English can work well as an interface language-culture. For example, English is useful when French humor cannot be transmitted to Korean audiences either through a literal translation or through domestication due to the target audience’s lack of knowledge of the source language-culture or because of a verbo-visual representation. Notably, the Korean version is not a mere reproduction of the English version, but rather shows its own creativity and self-censorship.