InContext - Volume 3, Issue 1, 2023

This paper introduces the ongoing project, ‘Towards Diversity, Equality and Sustainability in Streaming: Translating British Media in Korea and Korean Media in the UK,’ supported by the Fund for International Collaboration and the Economic and Social Research Council in the UK. The project aims to increase the understanding of the reception and translation of Korean media in the UK and British media in Korea. In terms of tickets sold in both countries, British media in Korea and Korean media in the UK are still marginalized. This suggests that there is a lack of connection between the two media industries and a scarcity of research addressing the production, collaborative production and reception of media contents. In the age of streaming, over-the-top (OTT) and streaming platforms seem to be the most efficient way to introduce the Korean and British media content to audience groups in the other country. Therefore, focusing on streaming, this project brings together practitioners and stakeholders of media content industries and researchers from Film Studies, Fan Studies, and Translation Studies in Korea and the UK in order to explore ways to promote Korean and British media content in translation through streaming services with the goal of promoting mutual exchange and sustainable media industries in each country. It highlights the importance of translation which gives access to foreign culture, while at the same time it underscores the need to explore ways to promote local culture and local production in translation. The results of this project can be widely used in and applied to relevant industries which have to make daily decisions on what and how to promote and distribute media. They have ramifications on relevant scholarship and stakeholders of industries. In addition, while we live in the age of fast media, whereby audiences consume numerous media every day, i.e. through binge-watching, this project brings much attention to the matter of sustainability and it suggests how slow media can be a feasible alternative to fast media by, for instance, hosting a gathering for audiences of certain films or TV programs and making an archive of media produced in the past and rereleasing or reusing them.

The emergence of conference interpreting as a profession, with the related formal attributes of a professional association, a code of ethics, and professionally-run training institutions, coincided with and was facilitated by the spread of simultaneous interpretation (SI) in the post-World War II period. SI enabled the increase in interpreted events and in the number of languages interpreted, thus accompanying the development of a multilingual institutional architecture. Whilst it also marked the beginning of a trend towards the greater distancing of interpreters from meetings, it led to greater proximity with peers, with the formation of interpreter teams. This helped to shape and consolidate informal professional attributes, such as a set of self-beliefs and norms. The greater physical distance of interpreters from the actual event has culminated in remote interpreting configurations of different types, the most extreme being full remote where interpreters interpret from their computers in separate locations.

On-site interpreter interaction encompasses many features, including practical forms of mutual assistance, but it also involves face-saving techniques, the sharing of knowledge and expertise, the alleviation of performance-related tensions and reinforcement of professional cohesion. Professional cohesion is understood here as compliance with a shared set of norms and adherence to shared beliefs, creating a feeling of belonging to and identification with the profession.

The use of remote interpreting involving interpreter home-working (henceforth called full remote) marks a sharp break with on-site teamwork, rendering some forms of cooperation difficult. In the following, we wish to consider how this might impact interpreter interaction and professional cohesion. To do so, a preliminary investigation of seven meetings has been conducted — two with interpreting on-site and five with interpreters in fully remote mode, with a view to identifying trends and patterns in interpreter exchanges in each. Preliminary observations indicate a notable reduction is some forms of interaction and cooperation. The intention of the article is to open up a new area of investigation and a new angle on the impact of remote interpreting on interpreters and the profession.

Ever since the establishment of Translation Studies as an independent academic discipline in the 1970s, there has been an ongoing debate about the relationship between theory and practice, to which this paper aims to make a modest practical contribution in the form of a novel procedure for textual analysis and synthesis. Intellectual advances are often triggered by flashes of inspiration which suggest analogies that facilitate shift in perception and focus that, in turn, lead to changes in understanding. What is offered here may not be a flash of inspiration but is, at least, a new analogy for the definition of translation: Translation is a kind of engineering, specifically reverse engineering (RE). Through the lens of RE, translation redefines itself as a mental-physical, two-phase, input-output process in which texts are deconstructed (read and understood) and reconstructed (written) as new texts that resemble the originals but are not copies of them. This suggests a model of translating that recognizes the crucial role of efficient reading in the process of translating and is realized in the form of a straight-forward, simple but revealing Procedure: a mechanism for expanding the individual translator’s competence as a reader and as a writer and for sharing this increased expertise with others. The approach outlined here, Translation as Reverse Engineering (TARE), would not exist but for insights from others, in particular a specific proposal from Ali Darwish (2008) and, crucially, from the broad sweep of Hallidayan Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), with its view of language as purposeful social action (1978) and the more recent translation-oriented work of Munday et al. (2008, 2021). The Procedure is described in detail and is demonstrated in action in the deconstruction and potential reconstruction of three short texts. The value of the approach may lie in the way it facilitates the work of the translator and, by becoming part of his or her toolkit (to borrow Chesterman & Wagner’s 2002 term), perhaps, contributing to bridging the current gap between theory and practice.

The present study takes a corpus-based approach to compare ten Korean novels translated into English with another ten Korean diasporic authentic novels written in English to explore differences in the use of italics between translated and non-translated literary texts. The focus is placed on how foreign words are italicized, since they represent the identity, history, and collective memories of Koreans as the interface between translated Korean literature and Korean diasporic literature. Especially since italics as a typographical device is seldom used in the Korean language, the italicization of foreign words also serves to reveal the style and decision of translators and their differences with original writers. Against this backdrop, the present study aims to see (a) if translated Korean literature and Korean diasporic literature exhibit significant differences in the use of italics; and (b) how the choices of original authors and translators differ in italicizing culture-specific and other foreign words. The present study employs Newmark’s (2001) typology to categorize culture-specific items (CSI) of foreign origin into six subcategories, while adopting Nord’s (2018, 1997) notion of phatic and expressive functions and developing other emerging categories to explain the italicized use of foreign words whose meaning is rather culturally universal but whose direct transfer in italicized form do convey cultural connotations.

The results of the analysis show that the most italicized category among all categories of italicization is foreign words, while the most notable difference is observed in emphatic italics. In the italicization of foreign CSIs, no significant difference is found except in one subcategory, while the lack of consistency in Romanization is noticeable in both corpora. As for non-CSIs, the use of phatic/expressive and foreignizing italics is significantly predominant in the non-translated corpus, reflecting the relative freedom of original authors to express a sense of otherness and diasporic identity. The present study provides unique insight on how the use of italics in foreign words elucidates the different styles and decisions of translators and original authors, but it will need to be complemented with a closer look into sentences containing these instances and a further review on the original texts of the translated corpus.

In this paper, I will discuss the Popular Woodcut Movement that emerged in Japan following its defeat in 1945 and continued during and after the Occupation period by General Headquarters. Popular woodblock printing was developed during the Chinese Revolution in 1949 and raised issues such as the relationship between the Enlightenment and socialists’ fine arts movement (puroretaria bijutsu undo, literally “proletarian fine arts movement”) or the Communist Party and popular club activities movements around then. The second part will turn to Nakazawa Keiji’s Hadashi no Gen, also known as Barefoot Gen: Life After a Bomb, A Cartoon Story of Hiroshima published in 1972. Nakawaza Keiji and Hadashi no Gen have some connections to the Popular Woodblock Printing Movement. He is a successor of the proletarian cultural/fine arts movement before and during wartime, accepting the legacy of the generation of his father, who also was a painter and artist. Barefoot Gen united the bodily practice of atomic bomb victims who suffered horrible disfigurations, with the personal/public struggles, and the idea of personal vengeance and socio-ethical justice. In addition, its visual-narrative structure subverts the Kant-Heideggerian epistemological hierarchy that presupposes a developmental progress from a lower to a higher level. This epistemological hierarchy is a power structure that has been problematized by feminist discourse because of re-producing an unequal distribution of knowledge. Thus, Barefoot Gen is an epistemological and aesthetic achievement essential for subaltern hegemony. The postwar popular woodcut movement had a common aim with Barefoot Gen to resolve the unequal distribution of knowledge, sharing a legacy of modern visual movements as an incomplete visual-aesthetic revolution. This paper claims that the postwar woodcut movement and Nakazawa Keiji’s manga were successors of the socialist/communist cultural movement during the prewar time and they wrestle with the debates within the fine arts circles of the times.

In this article we intend to show that, after a long period of the United States cultural domination through a practice of soft power, the world is witnessing very interesting changes. Similarly to politics, the cultural world is becoming multi-polar and intercultural influences can be noticed everywhere. But what is even more noteworthy is that the world is not heading towards a kind of potpourri without any flavor and generalized, but that we are witnessing a real diversity and a richness of our own cultural heritages and of future endeavors. After remembering the famous trade routes of the past which brought different countries in contact, now new cultural routes are built. Indeed quite a few countries have realized the importance of such a new approach. By culture we mean that a lot of applications can be made in several forms such as art, literature and so on. Thus South Korea, which is a real economic powerhouse, started to invest a lot in soft power practices such as King Sejong Institutes which have been set up in many countries. Not only South Korea but other Asian countries including Japan and China have launched new cultural projects. This paper intends to present a few examples of these intercultural links and observe how they are adopted in our countries as well as how they enrich our different societies. Obviously such influences did occur in the past, but we have noticed that at present, in particular among the younger members of our societies, there is a keen interest for these new cultural forms and approaches. Is it not our duty and our desire to answer such demand and to make the world more open and more tolerant for the benefit of all of us?

At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries, the process of Europeanization of the Central Asian region began. A certain stagnation in the development of traditional culture in the changing socio- cultural conditions predetermined the need to introduce new European forms of painting, graphics, and sculpture into the culture of Uzbekistan, or rather Turkestan. In the 1920s, the national school of fine arts in Uzbekistan was formed. During this decade, a unique phenomenon known as the “Turkestani avant-garde” was born, almost all of whose representatives lived and worked in Uzbekistan.

In the 1930s-50s, the fine arts of Uzbekistan, developing in line with the trends of all Soviet art, did not avoid contradictory and dramatic processes. A narrow understanding of socialist realism not as a creative method, but as an artistic style, the assertion of normativity in art, which gave rise to a set of prescriptions for plastic vision, a limited understanding of the meaning of artistic tradition, reducing it primarily to the traditions of Russian culture of the 19th century, limited the full development of art. In the 1960s-80s, a search for new forms of artistic generalization took place, which led to the approval of completely different plastic ideas. From this period, a certain pluralism of various artistic trends in the painting of Uzbekistan sets in, which intensifies during Uzbekistan’s period of independence from 1991 to now.

This article analyzes and classifies the main trends in the contemporary fine arts of Uzbekistan. An important problem in the art of Uzbekistan is preserving national identity in the era of globalization while integrating into the modern world cultural space. The article has practical applications, as it can be used as material on the contemporary art of Uzbekistan and Central Asia in art educational institutions and programs, as well as in the implementation of exhibition projects worldwide. Since the contemporary art of Uzbekistan was mainly covered from the point of view of the work of specific artists, many analytical generalizations were made on the basis of observations and of the author’s own scientific research.