Retranslation as a socially engaged activity: the case of The Rape of Nanking

Abstract

ABSTRACTThe Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang describes the massacre that took place in Nanking during the second Sino-Japanese war. Originally written in English, this book, which was published in the US in 1997, received wide attention and caused much controversy, not only in the US and Japan, but also in South Korea, where three different Korean translations have been published to date. This study examines The Rape of Nanking with a view to identifying various ways in which narratives encoded in the source text are reframed by the translator and the publisher to foreground particular events and to make them more salient in translation, while excluding, diluting, and downgrading others, in such a way so as to promote particular narratives. The contextual and textual analysis of the three Korean translations reveals that each translation is paratextually framed and temporally positioned, and also that they expand the scope of the original narrative to the South Korean setting by adding related events and issues that were of immediate interest to South Korean readers at the time of their publication.