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.
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.
So, Facebook’s buzzing over some idiotic opinion piece (don’t click on that link: trust me, you don’t need to read it) by one Choi Shi-yong that mostly amounts to “Korea=civilized; foreigner=uncivilized” as the theme that runs through the stream-of-consciousness drivel. There’s some particularly patronizing garbage about how sometimes they do after all… when they’re taught respect by Korean society: On the other hand, I saw a Canadian friend in a bus who has lived in Gwangju for over 10 years. He was willing to give his seat to the old lady after finding that she was standing right behind his seat. I thought that …
The other day I mentioned how I’ve been reading Peter H. Lee’s translation of the Imjin Nok (임진록), titled in English The Record of the Black Dragon Year. Lee is a scholar I’ve encountered before, mainly as an editor but also as a translator in the excellent 2-volume Sources of Korean Tradition, as well as A Korean Storyteller’s Miscellany: The P’aegwan Chapki of O Sukkwon—the latter, a book I own and I think I’ve loaned out to a friend, but which I haven’t read all the way through. In any case, my curiosity about the Imjin Nok is pretty much rooted in the fact that it’s popular …
Taehoon Lee is doing a useful service on Korea Observer that Robert Koehler used to perform over on The Marmot’s Hole, back when he started out: translating and posting Korean news items that don’t make it into the English-language news in Korea. But man, sometimes the reactions his postings get are just stupid and wrong-headed, and it’s almost always self-righteous expats who are eager to: critique the hell out of everything in Korea, and spew outraged critique all over Facebook Here’s an example, a poster for a dance recital at Chonbuk National University that went viral online. Lee posted about it …