Cultural Translation: A Case Study of Kyeongbokgung Palace

Abstract

This paper is concerned with communicative part of culture, and is to show the process of translation of culture or cultural transfer. For this purpose, one of the most authentic cultural assets of Korea, Kyeongbokgung palace's official homepage (http://www.royalpalace.go.kr) is reviewed based on Korean-English comparison tablet. While Kyeongbokgung palace as the total cultural asset accommodates a variety of culturemes, the palace homepage should furnish information in an efficient way for the tourists. The Korean-English transferring tablet based on the official homepage of Kyeongbokgung palace satisfies the linguistic transfer of Baker(1992)'s taxonomy for equivalence with successful delivery of message. As well it verifies Gutt's(2000) relevance theory in terms of the conceptual transfer (loss of formality, translator's addition or deletion) in the process of cultural translation. Consequently, the case study of Kyeongbokgung palace illustrates the role of translators in a wider context especially for the cultural translation.