Ethics of journalistic translation and its implications for machine translation
A case study in the South Korean context
Journalistic translation is governed by a target-oriented norm that allows varying degrees of intervention by
journalists. Given the public’s expectations for the fidelity of translated news, this norm entails ethical issues. This paper
examines the ethical dimensions of journalistic translation through a case study of political news translation in the South Korean
context. It investigates how newspapers translated a US president’s references to two South Korean presidents in accordance with
the newspapers’ ideologies and then came to apply the translations as negative labels as the political situation evolved over
time. The study demonstrates how even word-level translation can require an intricate understanding of the sociopolitical context
and cumulative meanings of a word. It then draws its implications for machine translation by comparing the human translations with
machine translations of the references in question. It concludes by discussing why machine translation cannot yet replace human
translation, at least between Korean and English, and what translation studies should do regarding the ethics of journalistic
translation.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Journalistic translation norms and translation ethics
- 3.Data and methodology
- 4.Results and discussion
- 4.1Translation of “this man”
- 4.2Translation of “easy man to talk to”
- 4.3Recontextualization of “this man” and “easy man”
- 4.4Human translation versus machine translation
- 5.Concluding remarks
-
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Cited by (1)
Cited by one other publication
Yang, Yanxia, Runze Liu, Xingmin Qian & Jiayue Ni
2023.
Performance and perception: machine translation post-editing in Chinese-English news translation by novice translators.
Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 10:1

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