Happy Chuseok, everyone. If you don’t know what that means, I’m talking about the Korean Autumn Harvest Festival. Some people mistranslate it as Korean Thanksgiving, but it’s not a great translation in my opinion. So… I’m going to geek out about a similar funny Korean-English translation glitch I ran across recently, mostly because it was fascinating.
Apparently I missed it when it happened, but a professor named Choe Tong-Hyon spent five years translating all the various versions of of Korea’s traditional pansori to English. At the time, a post on Seoul Stages mentioned that these translations were immediately posted to the Jeonju Sori Festival website. By some miracle the link (here it is) still seems to be working as of this morning. If you’re interested in pansori, but maybe not enough to go out and hunt for old published copies that might cost you more money than you want to pay, then you should grab ’em …
A couple of passages from books I’ve read recently, and then some thoughts on each. The Lady now finding her self in so strange a place, and amongst such wonderful kind of Creatures, was extreamly strucken with fear, and could entertain no other Thoughts, but that every moment her life was to be a sacrifice to their cruelty; but those Bear-like Creatures, how terrible soever they appear’d to her sight, yet were they so far from exercising any cruelty upon her, that rather they shewed her all civility and kindness imaginable; for she being not able to go upon the …
Update (31 March 2017): Matt over at Gusts of Popular Feeling of course beat me to the punch on this, though I didn’t see his post until just now. His numbers are different from mine: he remembers to include numbers for U.S. servicemen (which I didn’t: they’re probably about 20,000 in the Seoul area, but that’s an estimate he gives, and makes a marginal difference), and he’s using a different source and criteria for tourist data (I went with all Europeans, Oceanians, and Canadians/Americans, since Koreans tend to assume anyone white is “American.”) Despite these differences, Sim’s argument still looks ridiculous. But Matt …
This post is just an idea for a mass-game type exercise for a large EFL camp, riffing on Canadian history and specifically the fur trade.