earticle

영어

The purposes of the paper are (1) to evaluate translations of cultural texts that are already assigned and accepted by the public sector of Korea, using as a quality evaluation criterion the informative equivalence between the source and its translated text pairs, and subsequently (2) to question the validity/appropriateness of the existing Romanization practices prevalent in Korea in translating cultural texts. In order to do so, translations that have been both commissioned and accepted by 12 public sector organizations of Korea, including the Ministry of Culture and Tourism, Seoul Metropolitan City, and the Korean Administration of Cultural Heritage, are collected and analyzed. As for the organization of the present paper, after a brief introduction, the second part constitutes a theoretical review of the significance of informative equivalence as a criterion with which to evaluate translation quality. The third part discusses the research design and findings in detail. By way of conclusion, the fourth part questions the appropriateness of the prevalent Romanization practices as a way of transferring the informative contents of culturemes, and a suggestion for a new Romanization convention is made.