Korean prosody for Korean-to-English translation

Prosody refers to the musical aspects of speech, including melody, rhythm, and timing. In spoken language, prosody helps listeners infer a speaker's identity, such as their regional background, and plays a crucial role in judgments about their emotional state. Audible differences between happiness and sadness, for instance, are strongly influenced by melody and speech rate. Indeed, listeners often rely more on prosody than on lexical content when interpreting a speaker’s attitude. In contrast, written language lacks direct prosodic cues; however, prosody is still integral to its structure, as it organises syllables into rhythmic patterns.

This talk examines the prosodic structure of Korean and its implications for translation. Unlike West Germanic languages, Korean does not have word-level stress. While stress placement contributes to rhythmic organisation in Germanic languages, Korean relies on pitch (i.e. speech melody) and syllabic grouping to establish rhythm. This talk explores the role of prosody in Korean literary traditions, with examples from traditional sung verse (sijo) and Han Kang’s Human Acts. Through an analysis of these texts, we will consider how prosodic features influence translation choices when rendering Korean into English.

Dr Hae-Sung Jeon is a Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Central Lancashire. She has a BA with double major in Child Welfare and Studies, and English Language and Literature at Sookmyung Women’s University, South Korea, an MSc in Developmental Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh and a PhD in Linguistics at the University of Cambridge. Her main research interests are speech production and perception, phonology-phonetics interface, speech prosody and multimodal communication. She has published findings of her research in leading journals including the Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, Laboratory Phonology, and the Philosophical Transactions of Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

This lecture forms part of the "Translating Across Languages and Cultures Conference Series". It is sponsored by the Institute of Language, Culture and Society (ILCS) and ran by Oxford Brookes University.