I’m fairly confident in my ability to translate the general gist of an article accurately, but nitpicking on word choice and very specific phrases makes me uncomfortable because the burden of blame can get transferred to the wrong person — i.e., I find nothing ungenerous about what Lee Sun Mi is saying, and if it comes across as such to you, it’s the fault of my work, not hers. With that, case closed.

There’s a downside to being such an excellent (and apparently effortless) translator as javabeans is: her translations read so well and yet are so faithful that people tend to forget that they are indeed translations; and that all translations have intrinsic limits, no matter how gifted and accurate the translator. There are significant differences between cultures, reflected in the languages of those cultures, which sometimes defy translation; but a translator nonetheless has to do what s/he can to get at least a portion of the sense across that cultural barrier. The resulting inevitable compromises mean that it isn’t always wise to build arguments, let alone base more or less impassioned reactions, on the translation alone as understood within the value-system of the target language.

Consider the word “embarrassed” which led to the earliest comments above. One of the big problems translators between all languages face is that the complex “embarrassment-shame” is highly culturally specific and shows considerable variations between cultures. Since different cultures regard different things as “embarrassing” or “shameful” for different reasons and to different degrees, they differ in what precise sort of inner state or observable behaviour they label as “embarrassing”, so that matching up appropriate words across languages can be a tricky business.

The operative part here is the cited remark of LJA which is echoed in the title and then varied again a little further into the piece:

“… 감사하고 때론 민망한 마음도 크다” which comes out here as “… feel very thankful, and also somewhat embarrassed”.

As far as I understand it (and let’s remember here that here a rank novice in Korean is rashly commenting at leisure on the translation work of a bilingual genius who was working at high speed, but hey that’s the sort of bumptious creep I am, and I’m too old to change now) the key term here is 민망한 a “modifier” attached to 마음 and derived from 민망하다, an “adjective” in the special Korean sense of stative predicator, sometimes called a “descriptive verb”, with a meaning spectrum stretching from “miserable” through “sad” and “sorry” and reaching to “awkward”, “embarrassed”. So obviously, “embarrassed” is a perfectly fine translation of it. The snag is that in this context, an English-speaking reader tends to assume that LJA means that she felt “embarrassed” because she had somehow done something wrong, unseemly or inappropriate, and that she was in some way apologising for that. Hence the reaction in comment #3 “why would she be embarrassed!! [...] she should be proud of her work”. If we search some of the Korean on-line corpora for the stem 민망(not easy to do if you don’t have Korean Windows plus a lot of patience, thanks to the “foreigners go hang” attitude of so much of Institutional Korea as embodied in the corpus websites) it seems to occur quite frequently in the sense of “taken by surprise and not knowing quite what to make of the situation”, which is of course also within the scope of English “embarrassed”. But my own inclination would have been to sacrifice fidelity in the interests of nudging Anglophone readers into the right portion of the semantic field, and translate here as ” a little taken aback” rather than “somewhat embarrassed”. Because I think that’s what LJA is in effect saying. She was slightly bewildered to be praised for something that hadn’t been her conscious intention and a little unsure as to whether it was OK to take credit for it. Though I agree that then gives rise to the question: if she meant something more like 당황 than 민망 why didn’t she say so?

Which brings me (at last!) to the remark that triggered the exchanges of fire, especially in the way that in #34 ginnie clarifies what it was that invoked it, namely where LJA is quoted/translated as saying : “The fact that viewers are able to accept this issue of homosexual love so naturally is owed to Yoon Eun Hye, acting so lovably as the character of Eun Chan.” Now here, in a belated attack of due humility, I have to admit that there are parts of the syntax of the original Korean in this particular passage that fox me, so I’m now relying on hunches as much as proper linguistic data. But my sense is that what LJA is here saying is not “YEH is a lovable actress, and that’s why viewers could accept….”, but more like “LJA plays the part of EC in such a way that the character seems undisputably, spontaneously lovable and attractive to viewers of both genders, so that they are led to question their assumptions about the interconnections between gender, sexuality and love, and to view HG’s self-questionings about his own sexuality from that revised perspective. And if YEH hadn’t managed to bring that off, the efforts of all the rest of the team would have been much less fruitful, without being any the less admirable or important”. Pithy, huh?

Anyway, time I shut up. Since all this waiting (and typing) is giving me chopstick-finger cramp, maybe one of my fellow-campers could wrap me up a few nice morsels in a lettuce leaf with a dab of soyabean paste and stick it in my mouth. That way, they get to enjoy the silence and I get to enjoy the food.

There r many ways to get ur point across without sounding demeaning ex: Gong Yoo needs to be credited for his acting too and etc… instead of being insulting as if YEH’s acting is mediocre compared to his, and the rest of the CP cast…cause let’s be honest, you could have done better with ur choice of words.
As a fan urself, u wouldn’t like it either if anyone made ur fave celeb seem less deserving of praise compared to his other co-stars.

I am sorry javabeans for this last response regarding this matter…I dont want to turn it into a fan-versus-fan thing either, but I felt that I had to speak up so that maybe the next time, some people will try to be more tactful.

Yoon Eun Hye and Gong Yoo fans REALLY get along in soompi even to the extent that we camp in eachother’s thread to support them both, it’s the first time that this ever happened…but yeah I will shut up now.

My honest reaction to the news was that GY needs to be acknowledged just as much (if not more) for his portrayal of a man struggling with his sexuality and his turmoil while going through this process. Not only that, it is his portrayal as well as the director’s approach to this topic that made this issue of homosexual love in CP natural and worth-noting. The viewers’ acceptance of the said issue has more to do with GY’s subtle and natural performance.

By praising GY and saying that he deserves praise more than any other casts for CP does not mean that I hate other actors in the ensemble or does it mean I want to bring down any other factors that contributed to CP’s work. I am just more impressed with GY, that is all. Also, it would be irrelevent to bring QSS into this discussion. I am very impressed and satisfied with Jung Yoo Mi in QSS. I am proud and continue to be in love with QSS, which does not have any influence on my comments on CP here.

Javabeans….yes, CP is an ensemble work. For the overall series, of course, one cannot just credit Gong Yoo. I am not an advocate for a one-man show either. LOL.
I am sorry to have caused you some trouble within your blog. Let’s keep it happy. =) Amen to that.

Just like most people I was a bit offended by ginnie’s comments.

Gong Yoo was also praised in an article all by himself http://www.dramabeans.com/2007/08/gong-yoos-han-gyul-exactly-as-writer-pictured/#more-2185 by the writer Lee Sun Mi, so I dont understand that little temper tantrum just because it was Yoon Eun Hye’s turn to get her praise this time around, which she also deserves if I may add, let’s face it, if there’s no Gong Yoo as HK this show would suck, and if there’s no YEH as EC the show would suck as well.

And you are 100% right javabeans..it is not cool to bring one person down to build up the other. The best thing about this cast is their chemistry and their talent. They just click as a team, each one portay their character in a unique manner that makes them stand out, which is why it is absurd seeing them pitted against one another.

Sorry, I just had to voice out my 2 cents.