Literal translation vs. transposition or modification in Spanish-Korean translation
The rapid growth of translation studies has made remarkable progress in the old ‘literal vs. free’ translation debate. Now it is clear that a literal translation is not so accurate and faithful to the source text, and such concepts should be replaced by more precisely defined terms. In Korea, translation has been relegated to language learning, and a literal translation is still recommended in order to focus on the source language, although it is not possible to translate a totally different Indo-European language following closely the form of it. Furthermore, literary style, so common and frequent in any Indo-European language, aggravates the difficulties, because literal translation of a source language written in literary style usually distorts Korean language and leads to misunderstand correct meanings of the source language. In this paper, I have attempted to expose the problems of literal translation and to make rules of translating Spanish into Korean by using mainly ‘transposition’ and ‘modulation’, terms developed by Vinay and Darbelnet(1958). I hope to apply such rules to the education of Spanish or other foreign languages.