earticle

영어

Building on Song Yo-in’s discussion of “cross-cultural opacity,” this essay reconceptualizes the translation of culture-bound terms as a site where equivalence is not given in advance but negotiated through translator judgment. The essay is organized into four parts. The first part revisits Song’s triad of transliteration, definition, and analytical redistribution, and suggests that translation practice relies on a far broader range of strategies, including hybrid procedures, paratextual glossing, substitution, and omission. The second part challenges Song’s inbound/outbound distinction by introducing factors overlooked in his framework, such as translator idiolect, intratextual variation, and diachronic revision. The third part examines Song’s notion of emotive meaning, demonstrating that culture-bound terms often operate as carriers of evaluative and affective force and that preserving emotive meanings may require departures from strict denotational fidelity. The last part examines Song’s discussion of idiomaticization to show that cultural lexemes embedded in idioms no longer function as discrete cultural markers and therefore call for discourse-level interpretive solutions. In light of these four dimensions, the study positions Song’s theorization as a productive resource for contemporary debates on cultural translation and translator agency.