By Bae Ji-sook
Staff Reporter
The nation's first doctorate course dedicated to translation will be set up at Sungkyunkwan University to enhance practical skills for translators.
Current translation studies in other universities require a doctorate on translation theories, but the new course requires only translation skills for the diploma. For the examination of a thesis, one needs to turn in their translation and annotations only.
The course, ``Interdisciplinary Course for Translating Texts in Classical Chinese,'' will be a four-year combined masters and doctoral degree course.
The school plans to select 10 people for its first course starting from next year. There will be test on Chinese characters and all 10 selected will be provided with a government scholarship.
Most of the course is designed to enhance in-field skills.
Though many Korean classics were written in Chinese characters up till the early 20th century, a lack of manpower to translate them into modern Korean brought a closure to understanding the traditions of the country, Lee Chang-hyung of the school explained. Since 1960, only 23 percent of state-owned books and 12 percent of ordinary classics had been translated. There are 55 experienced translators dedicated to the job, but it will take at least 100 years to finish the job at this pace, lee explained.
The course will help foster specialists, communicators and curators in translating the classics into modern language, he said. The scholarship and diploma will enable current translators, of which 62 percent are doing it part-time, to focus on the work only.
``The 43 classes in the course will emphasize organized education enabling translators to become in-field professionals and take care of all the heritage our ancestors have left us,'' Lee said.