A Study on Politeness in English to Korean & Korean to English Translation

Abstract

Although politeness is a universal human communicative behavior, this paper explores politeness in English to Korean and Korean to English translation only in the linguistic point of view. The studies on the translation of Korean politeness can be divided into two parts, grammatical and pragmatical ones. In the grammatical view, politeness is generally studied as honorific vs non-honorific expression, while the pragmatic view classifies it as polite vs impolite. The purpose of this paper is to find out if politeness, one of the social norms, is transferred equivalently in the translated text, and how the translation methods affect translation with the framework of House’s (1997) overt and covert translation methods. This paper also explains general ideas of politeness by applying Lakoff’s (1977) politeness rules to the word level and Brown and Levinson’s (1987) FTA(Face Threatening Act) to the sentence level.