earticle

영어

Social perceptions of professional interpreters in Korea have changed substantially over time due to many factors such as political, social and economic developments. This study aims to explore changes in social perceptions of interpreters by analyzing how interpreters were described, reported and framed in the newspaper coverage. The data include 826 newspaper articles on interpreters from 72 daily newspapers published between 1948 and 2020 in Korea. For analysis, the articles were examined in terms of the number of reports on interpreters, topics, changes in attitudes towards interpreters, and their gender. The results show that drastic changes in the social perception of interpreters occurred in the 1980s, after the Graduate School of Interpretation and Translation of Hankuk University of Foreign Studies was founded in 1979. Since the 1980s, news reports on interpreters have become more positive, reflecting the higher social status of interpreters. In addition, the gender shift from male to female was found in the profession as the majority of interpreters covered in the media since the 1980s were female. The paper concludes with a discussion on the status of interpreters portrayed in the media from social and historical perspectives.