이화여자대학교 통역번역연구소

Jimin Lee and Seunghye Mah (2026). Postcolonial Accomplishment or Commercial Appropriation: The Strategy of Domestication Embedded in the Selective Foreignization of Human Acts. This study critically re-examines Human Acts, the English translation of Han Kang's Sonyeoni Onda, by empirically testing the propositions advanced in prior scholarship through an exhaustive source-target comparison. The analysis reveals a potent strategy of selective foreignization at work beneath the rhetoric of postcolonial representation, which is shaped by the commercial distribution structures of world literature. While the translation constructs a veneer of locality by retaining proper nouns and certain cultural markers, it systematically flattens the experimental narrative and the historical-political context of the source text through deletion, compression, explicitation, and renaming. Notably, the strategies that prior studies identified as consistent principles of foreignization are shown to be applied selectively and inconsistently. Building on these findings, this study offers a critical reflection on the forced choices and aesthetic compromises that translation confronts within the institutional environment of world literature distribution. (Gyeongsang National University, Dongguk University, Korea)