earticle

영어

While rhetoric is an art developed over two thousand years, the translation of rhetorical schemes and devices yet remains a murky territory, especially between language pairs belonging to different linguistic and cultural traditions, as in English and Korean. In an attempt to depart from discussions based on tone and nuance toward a more empirical approach to this issue, this article analyzes how specific rhetorical schemes are handled in the Korean translations of writings by the English polemicist Christopher Hitchens. The examination found that rhetorical schemes such as antithesis and hyperbaton were often toned down in translation, especially when the structures were combined with sound patterns and figurative language, due to the complex tonal effects sought in the original English. However, the examination also found cases that succeeded in accurately rendering these effects into Korean, which showed that rhetoric can be effectively translated from English into Korean; by first determining the rhetorical scheme of the sentence; secondly by recognizing the tonal effects created by sound patterns and other various devices of rhetorical style; and thirdly by maximizing these effects by utilizing adverbs, noun markers and verb endings, which are the basic tools of rhetorical style in Korean.