CAN KOREAN-TO-ENGLISH LITERARY TRANSLATION BE TAUGHT?

The new millennium has witnessed a surge in interest in and support for the “globalization” of Korean literature by various agencies and foundations in Seoul. In addition to the ongoing funding support provided by the Korea Research Foundation (under the Republic of Korea [ROK] Ministry of Education) and the Korea Foundation (under the ROK Ministry of Foreign Affairs) for “Korean Studies” in general, three institutions in particular have devoted themselves to the promotion of Korean literature and the translation of Korean literature into foreign languages: the Daesan Foundation, the Korean Literature Translation Institute (KLTI; now known as the Literature Translation Institute, Korea, or LTI Korea [한국문학번역원]), and the International Communication Foundation (ICF [국제교류진행회]). Of these three, Daesan and the ICF are private, while the KLTI is a government body created through an amalgamation of the literature arm of the former Korean Culture and Arts Foundation [한국문화예술진흥원] and the Korean Literature Translation Fund [한국문학번역금고] and affiliated with what is now the ROK Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism. The administrative teams and advisory councils of each of these three institutions are a combination of former business professionals–turned–cultural managers, government and private sector bureaucrats, and university professors (sometimes retired) of literature, the vast majority of whom are Korean and Korean-educated, with an occasional smattering of foreign expertise in certain limited consultative roles. Alas, the ICF is no longer a player. Much of its income in former days had come from the IELTS English-language proficiency exams that it administered, but that revenue stream dried up many years ago. The Korea Research Foundation, which until the turn of the millennium had been the main ROK government funder for Korean Studies programs outside Korea, has also ceased to exist. Instead, the Korea Foundation continues to fund certain kinds of academic programs, but into the void left by the KRF has stepped the Academy of Korean Studies (AKS), a postgraduate teaching and research unit under the aegis of the Ministry of Education. The AKS, then, is a new player, with financial resources far more substantial than those of the Korea Foundation, some of