My life at a Korean law firm (part 39)
By Jacco Zwetsloot
In my second semester at H University, I began teaching two new content-based courses.
The first was one that I designed and taught alone, an introduction to Korean-to-English translation. As far as I know it had never been taught at that school before, so I was surprised by how many students signed up.
In the end I had two (almost) full classes. The levels of English proficiency of the students ranged incredibly broadly. I was not expecting native speakers, but at least people who could write decent English sentences. While most could, some people clearly did not belong there. Because it was not a major or compulsory course, I wondered why.
Every week I set a Korean text of 1-2 pages to be translated into English. The texts varied in style and content ― from comic strips and North Korean media to short stories and movie scripts ― so that students would get a chance to try their hand at all sorts of material.
Each student was instructed to find a homework partner for the semester, and to exchange completed assignments with that partner for feedback before sending it to me. The main reason for this is twofold: another set of eyes on a piece of translation can often find errors or awkward spots that the translator herself cannot, and it helps to instill a sense of responsibility in students, because they must show it to their partner before submitting it.
This process proved harder in practice than it seemed in the conceptual stage (because students either could not be bothered or did their homework at the last minute), but I stuck with it each semester. For those students who did work with a partner, their work showed improvement. But for others, well, the less said about them the better.
The homework assignment one week was a serialized story about White Russian refugees living in the northeast of Korea during Japanese colonial times. That particular installment was about a tiger-hunting episode. All the students except one naturally used the word “tiger” in multiple places in their English translation.
The one exception used the word “crime” throughout, where one would expect to find the striped big cat. I could not work out why, until I decided to experiment by feeding the Korean text into the then nascent Google Translate machine, to see what came out. I tried it and ― voila ― the resulting “translation” was identical to the homework submitted by the student. The Sino-Korean word “beom” had been mistranslated as “crime” every time, changing the meaning of the text. In fact, the “text” now made no sense whatsoever anymore. Without naming the student, I used it as a case study to show students the dangers of machine translation.
Other students did very well; these were unsurprisingly often those who had lived for a time overseas. One of them became a professional freelance translator and interpreter later on, and we even worked together on some projects.
The second content-based course was a collaborative effort created with some instructor colleagues, in direct response to a perceived need among students who were about to graduate.
Many students were hoping to work for multinational companies, but lacked any kind of overseas experience (whether travel or study) or ― in most cases _ work experience. So a handful of us designed our own course and wrote a short textbook called “Employment English”, with the express aim of helping soon-to-be jobseekers write a resume, draft a cover letter, prepare for and go through a job interview ― all in English.
Demand was high. Some classes were oversubscribed, and some students had to drop out. A great many students wanted to join, because it actually met their needs and they had never seen this offered elsewhere before outside of hagwons. It turned out that English interviews were not just for international corporations; some Korean companies also ask questions in both languages.
Throughout the semester, we received several drafts of English resumes and cover letters as assignments, and gave painstaking feedback on all areas, from email addresses (choose a professional sounding ID, not something frivolous, childish or obscene), and layout (use tabs to keep things aligned neatly) through to dates (English has a different date format to that in Korean) and content (most international companies do not care about your blood type or what your parents do for a living).
The final examination was a mock job interview. A panel of three instructors in a room would question “candidates” about their resumes, hopes and dreams. They were encouraged to ask a question of their own to show interest and curiosity. Almost all students took this very seriously, dressing in business attire, coming with multiple printouts of their resumes on good quality paper, and very nervous.
Because there were so many students, and each interview took almost 10 minutes from entering to leaving the room, these examination evenings were as grueling on the instructors as on the students, but they left us with a feeling of having actually achieved something that was hopefully helpful and useful to students' careers.
It was all the more meaningful when we occasionally heard back from graduates that they had gained employment using the techniques and tips that we taught them.