ABSTRACT
One of the biggest hurdles that arises in Korean-English (K-E) literary translations is to translate invisibles – forms and functions that do not exist in either the source texts (ST) and languages (SL) or in the target languages (TL). Lauren Venuti criticised the trend of erasing all traces of foreignness as a form of ethnocentric violence, arguing that translators should deliberately foreignise their translations to balance this violence. Dealing with invisibility is a challenge that K-E translators face at every moment of the translation process, from a micro-level to a macro-level, because the two languages are linguistically quite different. From the beginning of the twentieth century, Korea has translated countless Western sources, mainly from English into Korean. The successful translation is evaluated based on its being suitable in the target language – without losing what is said from the source language. Translators particularly in dealing with invisibles, face pressures from two directions: the SL/ST and TL/target text audiences.
