Abstract
The Korean Armistice Negotiations are among the major historical events shaping geopolitical situations in East Asia after World War II. While previous studies of the negotiations followed mainly the approach of traditional historical research, the present study offers a new perspective of the ‘neglected’ participants – the interpreters who worked for the series of negotiations. An analysis of “post-hoc accounts” of interpreters, using a micro-historical approach, demonstrates complexity of interpreting for wartime negotiations and reveals various conflicts in the interpreting of armistice negotiations as perceived by the interpreters. Intense conflicts were found in the interpreting activity, including: conflicts between the interpreters on both sides of the negotiations, hidden conflicts between the interpreters and their principals, conflicts between different interpreter roles, conflicts over language use between the two sides of the negotiations, and conflicts arising from misconceptions of the interpreting activity. It was also discovered that the interpreters in the armistice negotiations were generally loyal as the army soldiers instead of maintaining a neutral stance, such as is expected from professional interpreters nowadays. The micro-historical study of the interpreters’ accounts of the major historical events can be useful in exploring and explaining what is hidden behind the complexity of conflicts, thus offering a new approach to interpreting studies as well as to historical studies.
Highlights
A micro-historical approach to the Korean Armistice NegotiationsThe Korean Armistice Negotiations, which started on 10 July 1951 at Kaesong, suspended and later resumed on 25 October 1951 at Panmunjom and continued until the armistice was signed on 27 July 1953, lasted over two years and “required some 575 meetings1 before agreement could be reached” (Foot, 1990, p. ix)
As the negotiations were held between representatives of the two warring sides: the Korean’s People’s Army (KPA) and the Chinese People’s Volunteer Army (CPVA) on one side and the United Nations Command (UNC) headed by the United States on the other side, we focus on the interpreting activity involving three languages in the negotiations, which is a much understudied area
In the interpreting activity of the Korean Armistice Negotiations, absolute fidelity was regarded as the ultimate norm and loyalty towards the principal was the prime ethics strictly observed by the interpreters
Summary
The Korean Armistice Negotiations, which started on 10 July 1951 at Kaesong, suspended and later resumed on 25 October 1951 at Panmunjom and continued until the armistice was signed on 27 July 1953, lasted over two years and “required some 575 meetings before agreement could be reached” (Foot, 1990, p. ix). The present study aims to investigate the historical event of the Korean Armistice Negotiations from the perspective of the ‘neglected’ participants – the interpreters who worked in the series of negotiations. Levi’s (1992) seminal work outlined the following approach to studies within the paradigm of microhistory: The microhistorical approach addresses the problem of how we gain access to knowledge of the past by means of various clues, signs and symptoms This is a procedure which takes the particular as its starting-point (a particular which is often highly specific and individual, and would be impossible to describe as a typical case) and proceeds to identify its meanings in the light of its own specific context. We attempt to investigate the historical event of the Korean Armistice Negotiations as recollected by the interpreters and other relevant participants. An examination of the whole process of the Korean Armistice Negotiations reveals that interpreting activities were part and parcel of the negotiations, the particularity and complexity of which will be discussed below
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