earticle

영어

Kwak, Joong-chol. (2007). On the Qualtiy of Consecutive Interpreting for Press Conferences : with Emphasis on Recent Korea-US Cases. Interpreting and Translation Studies 10-2, pp.1-26.
Mistakes made in interpreting top U.S. officials' remarks into Korean are nothing new. We had a Korean-American citizen with the State Department affiliation who interpreted top American officials for more than 20 years and he had been criticized by the diplomats and the media more often than not for his problematic performances. However, when he retired from his function in the middle of 2005, his successors gave rise to bigger gaffes and troubles around. When U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice met with Korea's Foreign Minister Ban Ki-moon in July 2005, a commotion arose among the journalists at the press conference when the lady interpreter from Washington translated Palestinian authority as gwonwi, referring to the meaning of 'power', and agreement for a non-nuclear Korean Peninsula as dongmaeng, or 'alliance'. Articles ran in many newspapers the next morning also criticizing subsequent parts of the interpreting, where Secretary Rice's comments were not fully transferred and some important ideas omitted.
Fourteen months later, at the September 15, 2006 press conference of President Roh Moo-hyun's visit to the White House, the new male interpreter for the U.S. side was not much of an improvement on his predecessor. A careful study of the recording of the conference shows hardly any of what President Bush said were correctly interpreted, the errors did not make the papers this time, only because all of it was less blatant. After the flawed performance of Secretary Rice's interpreter last year, Korea's Foreign Ministry had lamented that the U.S. interpreting remains a challenge to be solved. The fundamental problem, however, lies in the fact that Washington does not regard the issue as a very serious one. Similar cases of misinterpreting will continue as long as the U.S. does not discard its attitude of indifference, which is rooted in its sense of superiority over other countries and other languages. If Washington cannot find U.S. nationals from Korea who have necessary skills and experience, it should break tradition and instead call on professional interpreters, for example, working at the U.S. Embassy in Korea, who received proper training at graduate schools of interpreting. Only then will the shameful history of poor interpreting end. This paper examines misinterpreting cases in press conferences of top Korea-U.S. officials in 2005 and 2006 and searches for their causes, before coming up with possible solutions.