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ABSTRACT
Photojournalism relies on a polysemiotic text of visual and verbal signs. Verbal signs are usually shaped as captions and cutlines. In photojournalism, the text producer uses captions to limit the polysemic nature of photographic images. These captions can either limit the denotative meaning of the visual image or interpret and limit the connotative meaning. The purpose of this study is first to examine any differences between languages and cultures in how captions are used to limit the meaning of photographic images, and then to investigate whether these differences are reflected in translations of Korean photojournalism. Towards this purpose, the study progresses in two main directions. First, we investigate whether there are cultural differences between US and UK, Korean, and Japanese media, realized via the varying methods they use to limit photo captions. Having identified the differences between these three cultural groups, we will proceed to analyze and discuss from a semiotic standpoint how these differences are reflected in Korean-to-English and Korean-to-Japanese translation strategies.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Mi-jung Park completed graduation in 2003 from Hankuk University of Foreign Studies. He received a doctoral degree in Interpretation and Translation studies from GSIT, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, in 2009. He is presently working as Assistant Professor in the Department of Korean–Japanese, GSIT, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies. In addition, he works as an interpreter for Korean–Japanese international conferences. Mi-jung Park is a member of The Canadian Association for Japanese Language Education (CAJLE), The Japanese Studies Association of Australia (JSAA), and The Japan Association for Interpreting and Translation Studies (JAITS). He is interested in semiotic research and journalism theory in connection with translation studies.
Notes
1. Captions are the short ‘headlines’ over the ‘cutlines’. Cutlines are the words (beneath the caption, if there is one) describing the photograph or illustration (http://web.ku.edu/~edit/captions.html). While the term ‘caption’ is sometimes used interchangeably with ‘cutline’, for the purpose of this paper captions are differentiated from cutlines and refer only to the short headline or title of a photo, in line with the above description.
2. Hard news involves ‘the coverage of breaking events involving top leaders, major issues, or significant disruptions in the routines of daily life, such as an earthquake or airline disaster’ (Patterson, 2000, p. 3). On the other hand, soft news aims more to entertain. It is typically ‘more sensational, more personality-centered, less time-bound [ … ] and more incident-based than other news’ (Patterson, 2000, p. 4). The distinction between hard and soft news is one of the foremost examples of analytical strategy (Boczkowski, 2009, p. 101). See Section 2.1.1 for further discussion of this issue.
3. The characteristics of hard and soft news are summarized at http://www.csun.edu/~bashforth/406_PDF/406_Essay3/HardNewsVSFeatureStories.pdf
4. In the case of Yonhap News, both the main text and captions were drafted by a reporter. Dong-A Ilbo, on the other hand, used a professional translator to translate the main text, after which the caption was further edited by an editor who was also a former reporter. The Hankyoreh outsourced their articles to a professional translation agency, after which the translations (including the headlines) were edited by a reporter and editor.
5. This paper does not aim at evaluative interpretations – e.g. ‘good’ or ‘bad' – of the translated material.
6. Yonhap News drafts its own captions for photographs supplied by AP, Reuters, EPA, etc., but translates the cutlines into Korean and provides them under the photograph together with the original English cutlines.
7. Refer to .
8. All cases in which the writer infers either the thoughts or words of characters within a photo were considered cases of ‘double quotation’.