This article is an examination of translating procedure of Korean modern conceptual words following the definite indicator of bilingual dictionary. Particularly, this article concentrates on the pedigree that five different English-Korean dictionaries composed in modern Korea, which shows certain political nature.
Unlike a colloquial English-Korean dictionaries that were published for missionary work by Horace Grant Underwood(A Concise Dictionary of the Korean Language, The Fukuin Printing CO., L'T. Yokohama, 1890) and James Scott(English-Corean dictionary : being a vocabulary of Corean colloquial words in common use, Corea:Church of England Mission Press, 1891), the dictionary which was designed by George Heber Jones(An Enlgish-Korean dictionary, Tokyo, Japan : Kyo Bun Kwan, 1914) aimed for educational usage and it can be analyzed as a kind of experiment to find stand-in Korean words for western academic terms. The experiment of Jones that seems to consider the legal authority of the Imperial government was approved in the public sphere of Joseon which was reorganized after 3.1 movement. Taking account of foreign missionaries’ comments on vocabulary arranging work of The Korea Bookman and on Korean modern magazines, modern Japaneseque sino-Korean words that Jones suggested in his experiment were widely used among Koreans after 3.1 movement. In other words, it was Koreans‘ practice of discourse that modern Japanese translated concepts which obtained legality in both educational and administrational areas could achieve ‘legitimacy‘ as Korean language.
Ironically, Underwood’s English-Korean dictionary(1925) was published when foreigners no longer catch up Korean’s modern transition with both its impact and speed. The more discourse network between empire and colony and language struggle between oppressor and resisters acute, the more the distance between vocabularies of Japanese and of Korean narrowed. Meanwhile, Foreign missionaries’ translated words were formulated not through the method of reading-collecting-arrangingtranslating but through ‘translating from translation’ of ‘potential Korean’ such as English-Japanese dictionary or Japanese-English dictionary. By now the concept that explaining Korean vocabularies with Korean language also ramified. In modern Korea, therefore, the pedigree of English-Korean dictionaries that was continued with empire-colony relations and was created by inter-formation with foreign languages shows how language’s legitimacy or peculiarity creates, which reflexes truly ‘vernacular’ and inter-national mechanism.