Now there is a language where you can't even bloody well say hello without knowing the other person's age, gender, marital relationship and possibly shoe size, and all of it contrasted to your own.
Um...no. I don't know where you're getting your information from, but generally, gender doesn't matter. Age, yes, all the time, and in a hierarchical setting, like a company, one's rank. Marital relationship doesn't really matter either, except in the more general sense that unmarried people tend to be younger than married people. Age trumps all, but it's really not that complicated since you do normally ask someone their age upon introduction if you're going to interact with them in the long term (or if it isn't obvious already).
I've always wondered how the hell one would communicate in Korean if one had amnesia and didn't know one's social standing. My god! You couldn't communicate at all! There are no verb tenses for "I have no freaking clue"!
You would use a polite speech level, just as in English you speak politely to any stranger about whom you know nothing. There are seven speech levels, but only four are still in common conversational use. Two are polite, two are impolite/casual/intimate. For most conversations among adults, you use the polite informal speech level, which is in fact the speech level that is first taught in most Korean language classes. In fact, despite what I said above about age mattering a lot, you would probably go around speaking polite informal to most adults regardless of whether they were older or younger than you, unless you were close enough to drop into casual. As soon as I entered my late teens, most adults who were obviously older than me started speaking to me in polite informal unless they were close friends of my parents who knew me well enough to use casual speech levels.
The only complication is that you do add special honorific inflection or use special honorific verbs (in any speech level) when you're talking to/about people that you want to show special respect, and usually it's in quite an obvious context: the person in question is either considerably older than you (an elder) or obviously higher in rank (your work superior, the president of a company, etc.). If there are no obvious signifiers of status, you would not use these honorifics until given further information.
Forgive the long digression but you've touched on one of my pet peeves: Western expats in Korea often complain about the honorific system and the hierarchical nature of Korean society. Personally, as a Korean-American, I've always found English to be maddeningly confusing because conveying politeness/rudeness is much more nuanced, and it's easy to make a mistake in tone. I've always found social interactions to be much more straightforward in Korean because you know where you stand and you always know what to say.
In practice, from what I've seen, speech levels and honorifics in Korean are not really translated into English (unless it's one of the other three archaic speech levels that are no longer in common use, in which case, translators typically fall back onto archaic-sounding English). Also, since Korean culture is less well-known in the U.S., most books I've seen use far fewer untranslated words since there is not the assumption that the reader will have any idea what they mean.
To get back to the point of your post, I think there's an argument to be made for leaving terms untranslated as a form of resistance (there's a great post I read about this topic here: Only Poems Can Translate Poems: On the Impossibility and Necessity of Translation), but that is completely undermined if the translation is provided afterwards in the dialogue. (The "sumimasen--excuse me" example you mention is also my pet peeve.) I also do italicize Japanese words in my animanga fanfiction because I'm always aware that my audience's default language is English while the default language of the source is Japanese, but I've lately come around to the position that I should stop the habit (unless I'm writing in third person omniscient POV).
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Date: 27 Aug 2010 03:50 pm (UTC)Um...no. I don't know where you're getting your information from, but generally, gender doesn't matter. Age, yes, all the time, and in a hierarchical setting, like a company, one's rank. Marital relationship doesn't really matter either, except in the more general sense that unmarried people tend to be younger than married people. Age trumps all, but it's really not that complicated since you do normally ask someone their age upon introduction if you're going to interact with them in the long term (or if it isn't obvious already).
I've always wondered how the hell one would communicate in Korean if one had amnesia and didn't know one's social standing. My god! You couldn't communicate at all! There are no verb tenses for "I have no freaking clue"!
You would use a polite speech level, just as in English you speak politely to any stranger about whom you know nothing. There are seven speech levels, but only four are still in common conversational use. Two are polite, two are impolite/casual/intimate. For most conversations among adults, you use the polite informal speech level, which is in fact the speech level that is first taught in most Korean language classes. In fact, despite what I said above about age mattering a lot, you would probably go around speaking polite informal to most adults regardless of whether they were older or younger than you, unless you were close enough to drop into casual. As soon as I entered my late teens, most adults who were obviously older than me started speaking to me in polite informal unless they were close friends of my parents who knew me well enough to use casual speech levels.
The only complication is that you do add special honorific inflection or use special honorific verbs (in any speech level) when you're talking to/about people that you want to show special respect, and usually it's in quite an obvious context: the person in question is either considerably older than you (an elder) or obviously higher in rank (your work superior, the president of a company, etc.). If there are no obvious signifiers of status, you would not use these honorifics until given further information.
Forgive the long digression but you've touched on one of my pet peeves: Western expats in Korea often complain about the honorific system and the hierarchical nature of Korean society. Personally, as a Korean-American, I've always found English to be maddeningly confusing because conveying politeness/rudeness is much more nuanced, and it's easy to make a mistake in tone. I've always found social interactions to be much more straightforward in Korean because you know where you stand and you always know what to say.
In practice, from what I've seen, speech levels and honorifics in Korean are not really translated into English (unless it's one of the other three archaic speech levels that are no longer in common use, in which case, translators typically fall back onto archaic-sounding English). Also, since Korean culture is less well-known in the U.S., most books I've seen use far fewer untranslated words since there is not the assumption that the reader will have any idea what they mean.
To get back to the point of your post, I think there's an argument to be made for leaving terms untranslated as a form of resistance (there's a great post I read about this topic here: Only Poems Can Translate Poems: On the Impossibility and Necessity of Translation), but that is completely undermined if the translation is provided afterwards in the dialogue. (The "sumimasen--excuse me" example you mention is also my pet peeve.) I also do italicize Japanese words in my animanga fanfiction because I'm always aware that my audience's default language is English while the default language of the source is Japanese, but I've lately come around to the position that I should stop the habit (unless I'm writing in third person omniscient POV).