{"id":5868,"date":"2006-07-06T10:29:00","date_gmt":"2006-07-06T15:29:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.froginawell.net\/korea\/2006\/07\/glossing-over-history\/"},"modified":"2014-08-30T14:22:51","modified_gmt":"2014-08-30T14:22:51","slug":"glossing-over-history","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/2006\/07\/glossing-over-history\/","title":{"rendered":"Glossing over history"},"content":{"rendered":"

I thought I\u2019d write a quick post about another web resource I\u2019ve just started to use quite a bit recently. This is the online Glossary of Korean Studies<\/a> put together by the Academy of Korean Studies. I\u2019ll start with a gripe: the search function doesn\u2019t work in Firefox. Ok, now that\u2019s out of the way I can say that I think this is an absolutely wonderful resource \u2013 it\u2019s massive and generally seems very well put together. The methodology that they have used is to rely, where possible, on a body of English-language books on Korean history mainly written or translated by Western scholars as their basic source material for translations of Korean historical terms. Specifically, the books that seem to have been most commonly used are Yi Kibaek\u2019s A New History of Korea<\/em>, translated by Edward W. Wagner; James B. Palais\u2019 Politics and Policy in Traditional Korea<\/em>; Martina Deuchler\u2019s The Confucian Transformation of Korea<\/em> and Han Woo-Keun\u2019s The History of Korea<\/em>. Obviously there are limitations to this approach \u2013 most of these books are now quite old and more recent works may have opted for other translations. But in general they seem like a pretty good selection particularly since they are very respected and established works that all undergraduates studying Korean history are likely to encounter at some point or another.<\/p>\n

In general I think it is a good idea that we have standardised translations of Korean historical terms as well as standardised transliterations (actually the AKS glossary provides transliterations in both the current government system and M-R). It can certainly be confusing reading about the Ministry of Taxation in one book, the Board of Finance in another and the Board of Revenue in yet another (I\u2019m talking about the Chos\u014fn dynasty central government institution called the Hojo \u6236\u66fa). Having said that, I would be wary of advocating in principle that all scholars use the same terms. Clearly people might have very specific reasons why they prefer one translation to another or they might want to challenge a particular translation on the grounds that it is not an accurate reflection of the meaning of the original (Sino)-Korean term. <\/p>\n

An example that I can give you from my own research is that of the terms sij\u014fn<\/em> \u5e02\u5edb and yug\u016dij\u014fn<\/em> \uf9d1\u77e3\u5edb. You will usually find these translated as \u2018licensed store\/shop\u2019 and the \u2018six licensed stores\u2019 (as they are in the AKS Glossary<\/a>). This takes the character \u5edb to mean a shop, which is in one sense correct as the term sij\u014fn<\/em> did indeed refer to the merchants\u2019 shops that lined the streets of central Seoul during the Chos\u014fn period. However, in practice, the terms sij\u014fn<\/em> and yug\u016dij\u014fn<\/em> actually referred to the groupings of merchants arranged into guilds according to the products they sold. When government documents refer to the sij\u014fn<\/em> or yug\u016dij\u014fn<\/em> they are referring to these merchants\u2019 organisations that actually interacted with the government on behalf of the individual merchants. Thus in my work I always use the term \u2018guild\u2019 to translate sij\u014fn<\/em> and \u2018Six Guilds\u2019 to translate yug\u016dij\u014fn<\/em> as I think the translation \u2018licensed stores\u2019 can be quite misleading to the modern reader.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I thought I\u2019d write a quick post about another web resource I\u2019ve just started to use quite a bit recently. This is the online Glossary of Korean Studies put together by the Academy of Korean Studies. I\u2019ll start with a gripe: the search function doesn\u2019t work in Firefox. Ok, now that\u2019s out of the way…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":53,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[126,211,164,200],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5868","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","category-korea","category-translation","category-web-sites"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9yoH3-1wE","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5868","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/53"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5868"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5868\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6177,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5868\/revisions\/6177"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5868"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5868"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5868"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}