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Article published In:
APTIF 9 - Reality vs. Illusion: From Morse code to machine translation
Edited by Frans De Laet, In-kyoung Ahn and Joong-chol Kwak
[Babel 66:4/5] 2020
► pp. 829–846

Ethics of journalistic translation and its implications for machine translation

A case study in the South Korean context

| Hankuk University of Foreign Studies

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.

Keywords: journalistic translation, translation ethics, ideology, recontextualization, machine 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
  • References
Published online: 2 October 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/babel.00188.son
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