漢譯本 『士民必知』의 飜譯 樣相에 대한 연구

Abstract

“SaMinpilJi(士民必知)” is the earliest world geography textbook in Korean Language. It introduced various natural phenomena on the earth and the location, climate, population, language, culture and etc. of the major countries in the world. This book was written by Homer Bezaleel Hulbert who supplied as an American missionary in Korea during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In 1895, Kim Taeg-young(金澤榮), Bae nam-kyu(白南圭) and Lee Myung-sang(李明翔) translated the book into Chinese. In this paper we tried to find out the reason why “SaMinpilJi(士民必知)” was translated from Korean into Chinese. Especially, in the late 19th century most of the educated people in Korean began to use pure Hangul instead of Korean mixed script since they recognized the value of the pure Hangul. We considered that Kim Taeg-young(金澤榮), one of the most famous Chinese scholars at that time, played an important role in the Chinese tranlation of “SaMinpilJi(士民必知)”. We also examined the translation aspects of “SaMinpilJi(士民必知)” by comparing the original text with the Chinese translation, and we found out the following important features. First, in the original text every country was described in the same order while in the Chinese translation it was changed a lot. Only the important information was located in the front of every text and relatively less important one had a back position, or even deleted in the Chinese translation. We called this kind of translation ‘balchueyeok(拔萃譯)’ where the important parts were translated only. Second, new contents about the history of every country were added in the Chinese translation. Note that the added contents were mainly connected with the history of China.