Hwang Jungeun's One Hundred Shadows; A Study of Korean Onomatopoeia and How They Are Affected by Translation : Korean to English and Korean to Swedish

Sammanfattning: The book Paegŭi Kŭrimja (One Hundred Shadows) written by Hwang Jungeun (Hwang Jŏngŭn) was published in 2010 and translated by Jung Yewon (Chŏng Yewŏn) in 2016 after its success throughout South Korea.  It does not yet exist an official translation in Swedish and therefore, in order to make a comparative analysis about the differences in translation between Korean, English and Swedish, which is the author of the present thesis’ native language, the author have translated a part of the book (pages 1-40) during a course in Korean literature translation into Swedish. This thesis will be specifically focused on how the Korean onomatopoeias in the book have been changed through translation and what difference that creates for the meaning and nuance of the source text. This thesis uses a comparative qualitative method to examine how the onomatopoeias in the book have been affected by the English and the Swedish translations where the author found that there were some onomatopoeias that were more affected by translation than others, whereas omission was found to be the most used translation strategy, which resulted in some loss of nuance, but that no meaning was lost when omitting or changing the onomatopoeias. This thesis also compares the differences of the English and Swedish translations which were also considered to be minimal and disregarding one’s personal stylistic choice, the author found both translations to be appropriate and was therefore also not considered to affect the text in a significant way. The author hopes that further research about onomatopoeias and their place in translation will be studied in the future, as well as translation between Korean-English and Korean-Swedish to further expand and discover the Korean-English and Korean-Swedish literature area.