earticle

영어

In the Korean language, onomatopoeia makes up a significant proportion of the lexicon and is actively employed by writers as an important expressive tool in literature. Pak Wan-sŏ, one of the most widely-read fiction writers in post-war Korea, is recognized for her distinctively idiomatic narrative voice, in which onomatopoeia plays a major part. This article examines how Pak’s use of onomatopoeia is reflected and rendered in English translation, through a close, empirical analysis of four respective English versions of four different short stories by Pak. The examination found that all four translations chose to omit or paraphrase a majority of the onomatopoeic words in the original. However, the results also found a number of cases where the translators attempted creative translation strategies to reflect the onomatopoeia, the most notable of which was substituting the onomatopoeia with lyrical mechanisms. This discovery underlines an effective strategy for translating onomatopoeia from Korean into English, thereby rendering the rich and unique authorial voice in the target language.