Comparative analysis reveals distinct translation strategies for Korean solar terms in Japanese versus English radio broadcasts, indicating cultural familiarity governs explanatory detail.
Key Points
To investigate how cultural familiarity, audience background knowledge, and radio acoustics shape the translation strategies used for the traditional twenty-four solar terms in multilingual KBS World Radio broadcasts.
Analyzed KBS World Radio broadcast scripts in Japanese and English spanning 2022 to 2023.
Evaluated translation techniques across languages, comparing the deployment of shared cultural references, loan words, translator explanations, and conceptual generalizations.
Japanese broadcasts predominantly utilized shared cultural references grounded in common Sino-Korean character knowledge, adding translator explanations alongside loan words only for central themes or unfamiliar seasonal markers.
English broadcasts operated under the assumption of zero baseline audience familiarity, consistently providing explanations at first mention before simplifying to loan words alone.
English scripts frequently employed translation by generalization to map traditional solar terms onto Western calendar concepts, identifying cultural familiarity as the primary driver of translation complexity.