Unlike English and Romance languages, words aren’t always blatantly gendered in Korean. In the majority of cases, the gender is implied and understood by readers, who are typically native speakers.
To understand what “implied” means, consider this made-up example:
- Duchess Marissa rules over the Kant Duchy.
In English, a duke is generally understood as a male who rules over a duchy. The Korean equivalent of this word, 공작 (Romanized: gong-jak) refers to a person who rules over a duchy, regardless of their gender. As a result, there are certain misunderstandings that can arise when translating who Marissa is exactly in proximity to the duchy. This can be seen in the following example:
- Duke Marissa rules over the Kant Duchy. He is a genius tactician.
Translating machines like Papago and Google Translate, as well as human translators who aren’t very familiar with the Korean language, have a tendency of being unable to pick up or having trouble picking up the implied gender in the sentence.
These errors can be hard to pick up in web novel translations if there isn’t much context, like a character who makes their first appearance without any clues on who they are, especially if they don’t have a stereotypical, “gendered”-sounding name. Manhwa and webtoons on the other hand, generally give clues through the images. Additionally, due to the implied gender of the word, there may be continued mistranslation errors of a character’s pronouns, leading to further reader confusion on which character said what.
Another misunderstanding that may arise from implied gender is that a female character is assumed to be a spouse of a male who has the power, rather than the woman having the power herself. To acknowledge what was lost during translation, the best way to get around this issue is for the translator to leave a simple note, like in the following example:
- Duchess Marissa* walked into the office.
*Note: Duchess Marissa is the head of the Kant Duchy.
In some cases, translators will just leave the male version in order to convey the power, like in the following example:
- Duke Marissa walked into the office.
For proper localization purposes, the former example of “Duchess Marissa” with an optional note should be used to acknowledge the gendering of the English language and to avoid any confusion.
Another reason for why this may be confusing because “duchess” typically implies the wife of a duke, rather than a female powerholder. In Korean, there is a distinction between the power – the consort of a duke is addressed as 공작부인 (Romanized: gong-jak bu-in) in Korean, which literally means “Duke + -ess”. As such, it’s important to recognize the distinction between the female head of a family and a consort of the head of the family.
A real-life example to understand this concept is how people refer to Elizabeth II of the United Kingdom. She was the head of the British monarchy and was called the queen, not the king. Additionally, her husband was referred to as the prince consort rather than the king, illustrating that a woman was the official head of the household and her spouse married into said household.
tags: glossary, rofan glossary, romance fantasy glossary, ropan glossary, manhwa notes glossary, translation, translations, manhwa notes translations, manhwa notes translation, korean, english, romance fantasy, rofan, ropan, January 28, 2024, manhwa notes, manhwanotes
