I saw an interesting photo a while ago. It's a menu sign called “Maesaeng is abalone porridge,” and the English text on the bottom caught my eye. 'every life is ruined'? At first, I thought it was a quote, and when I thought about it, it was the English spelling of “Maeseng is abalone porridge.” Is there such a significant mistranslation? It seems to be a moment when anyone in the translation industry feels like because they want to fix it. Every time I see this kind of mistranslation in my life, I laugh and think a lot about the translated words.
As in the global era, translations in various languages can be found in many places, such as restaurant menus and tourist information signs. Looking at these translations often affects fear and laughter. The most common example is considering a restaurant menu. It's not meant to find similar examples, such as when “Gomdang” is translated as “bear soup,” or when “tofu” is translated as “head (head).”
However, this mistranslation does not only do not properly understand the meaning, but it may cause also cultural misconduct, so starting in 2015, the correct Korean menu notation was understood at the government level.
It's not just a problem with the menu. There have been discussions about how to express place names for a long time. A typical example is the Han River. There was a time of discussion about how to describe the Han River, such as “Hangang” and “Han River.” Of course, this too has now been unified to some extent thanks to government-level differentiation.
In order to improve this aspect, the National Institute of Korean Language has been discussed out of the “Public Language Translation Interpretation Project” since 2013. The purpose is also to promote Korean language and culture in the right way. Thanks to this, anyone can search for popular notes such as various public terms, Korean food names, and cultural property names if mentioned.1
The reason why the government is the interpretation of public language translations is that it also means that the number of foreign affairs visiting Korea has been discussed, but it is also related to the globalization and image discussions of the country beyond simply the level of guidance.
Further from this, there is another discussion about the process of proper changing nouns into foreign languages. It's a question of whether to translate the proper noun by transcribing it as it is, or whether to translate it by unraveling it so that the meaning can be understood. In the case of “bibimbap,” the Korean food is already very famous, so they use the same cooking method as “bibimbop” when translating to English. However, the lesser-known Korean food “Gomdang” has different notations in all three languages: English, Chinese, and Japanese. According to the public language translation information provided by the National Institute of Korean Language, it is written as “beef bone soup” or “gomtang” in English, “beef bone soup (beef bone soup)” in Chinese, and “komtang (komtang)” in Japanese.
However, there are advantages and benefits to advantages on advantages and meaning when translating. The advantage of transcribing the difficulties as is that when a foreigner who doesn't know Korean well says a specific word, a Korean can immediately identify the target. Instead, it is considering for understanding the exact meaning of the word at once. If you translate the opposite meaning, that is, if you translate Gomdang as “ugoltang” in Chinese, the correct Korean explanation is unknown, but as soon as you see this notation, you can understand what kind of food it is and the meaning of that food. Of course, since Chinese uses the logotype kanji, it is mentioned to transfer all pronunciations to consonants and vowels in the native language, such as phonetic characters such as Korean, English, and Japanese, so they also use a writing method that conveys the meaning of
The reason why many people think about how to translate even such a complicated food name is that translation is the most basic and important means of connecting people with language between them. Even in the small context of translation quality, machine translation still has many errors in these proper names and public terms, so in the end, a database of translated words interpreted by humans is an important factor in considering the quality of machine translation results. If you check through a search every time, different translations may be difficult on the source, so uniformly may be poor, but it is not translated to translate existing translated documents into consistent terms by consistent terms into data, such as the Gicon Studio Translation Dictionary (TD). 2
Since exchanges with other countries are considered in this era where the concept of a global community has spread, accurate and accurate translations are an important means of arguing the language and showing for. In the end, this is linked to the image of the country.
1 National Institute of Korean Language Integrated Public Language Support (https://publang.korean.go.kr)
*This content has been published from Gicon Studio to Letterworks.
