Hey everyone. You can call me Mars and I am a translator-in-training. I want to make this clear right away- I am not a native Korean speaker. My credentials are my three years of everyday study, three semesters of high beginner to low intermediate college Korean and my obsessive need to know everything about grammar. I started translating BTS’s songs in summer 2018, where it used to take me days to understand the grammar and vocab I was dealing with. I’ve improved a lot since then, and now it takes me just a couple of hours (or minutes, depending on the difficulty) to do each song.
A few notes:
- When translating, I don’t always keep things literal. This is because structures that make sense in Korean don’t always sound so nice in English. My goal when translating is to convey the meaning of the original Korean lyrics while also preserving any rhyme/wordplay where possible.
- Lyrics in Korean are often clauses that describe a noun (adjective clauses, if I'm not mistaken) and not complete sentences, whereas in English, it would sound more natural as a complete sentence. For example, “땀에 잔뜩 밴 채 만난 넌” literally means “you that i met while (you were) soaked with sweat”, but I might translate this as “I met you while you were soaked with sweat”. The end meaning is the same. There’s no real difference in the words conveyed. But changing a phrase into a complete sentence or clause will often sound much more natural.
If you’re a native speaker/also learning and have any suggestions on how I could improve any of my translations, I am completely open to them. All mistakes are my own!
Please enjoy,
Mars
No comments:
Post a Comment