『레라미 프로젝트(The Laramie Project)』의 성소수자 지칭어 번역

Abstract

The discourse of homosexuality in Korea is particularly pronounced in the cultural field, and literature, film, play and musical are the areas where homosexuality is the most visible. For a society that has long deemed heterosexuality as normal to accept and translate works on homosexuality in itself constitutes an ideological and political action since those works inherently contain a political claim that discrimination against homosexuals is not legitimate. Meanwhile, in less than a generation, terms referring to sexual minorities have gone through changes so radical that even contemporary people comprehend them very differently from each other. Homosexual, gay, homo, queer, fag or faggot and other vocabularies for sexual minorities are polysemic words which could be regarded as normal or depreciatory depending on how the public see homosexuality, and they also orient some of the most representative political correctness of these days. In other words, the terms could serve as a scale that could reflect the user’s perception of homosexuality, hence requiring a cautious approach from the translator. As such, this study attempts to analyze how words referring to sexual minorities in The Laramie Project are translated into the Korean language through text analysis and interview.