세계문화유산 「영릉」의 영문안내판에 나타난 오류

Abstract

A cornerstone is located at the entrance of Yeongneung which was recorded on the UNESCO World Heritage List in accordance with the Convention concerning the Protection of World Cultural and Natural Heritage in 2009. As is well-known Yeongneung is one of the 40 royal tombs of the Joseon Dynasty. Like the cornerstone, all the information boards here were renovated after it was designated as a world heritage. There are more than twenty information boards here including the cornerstone. But in this paper we examined only four information boards, namely the cornerstone “Royal Tombs of the Joseon Dynasty”, “Tomb of King Sejong the Great (Yeongneung)”, “Sejongjeon” and “Yepongneung Monument” (the misspelling of Yeongneung is shown at the title of the information board). The errors are examined in four categories, namely vocabulary errors, errors caused by addition, errors caused by omission and unfaithfulness of translation. Many vocabularies are found to be used wrongly, and the translator added too much useless contents and omitted much more necessary contents. Those errors naturally lead to unfaithfulness of the translation. The source texts themselves seem to be very difficult to understand. They inserted a lot of Chinese characters in the source texts and the source texts contain a lot of culture specific items. The distortion of the contents seems to have been caused by the unfaithfulness to the source texts as examined in this study.