::A Geek in Korea::

Speech contest season is upon Korea once again, which means my wife has request after request to translate speeches for students. This is part of her responsibilty at her school. Her boss, due to pressure from the student’s mothers, expects her to help these students cheat on their speech contests. This means I get called in to help with the grammar and translation of the final products. While we supply the English text, in most cases, the students aren’t responsible for most of the writing of the Korean either.

Today’s speech was a book report done by a girl in elementary school. It might have actually been written by the girl as well. It was a book report about what happens to garbage after it has been thrown away. The girl talks about how garbage bins get stressed as people throw garbage into them. She says that garbage cans must be sad when they are full. She says that garbage cans must really love the garbage truck, because it takes the garbage away. She called garbage trucks, "The savior of all garbage cans".

When you translate something, you can easily manipulate the content to sound better or worse. While you want to remain neutral, you can change tone, intent, and meaning significantly as you go. We try to remain as literal and honest about our translation as we can. We know that calling garbage trucks "saviors" is an odd thing to say, but it’s what she wrote. We aren’t going to change what she said to put it into our own more adult voice. Keeping the original "voice" for such speeches can be rather difficult, because when a parent has written the entire speech to begin with, it often muddles the translation. They tend to use words no children would know, and trying to write simple sentences for them to memorize in English would be difficult. When politics or some sort of agenda gets involved, it’s often very frustrating to translate without feeling like a complete tool.

The worst thing about the entire speech contest season is the fact that all the students are forced to memorize everything we write. We try to keep the sentences simple, but when parents write long speeches, the students often have several pages to memorize. We don’t make listening tapes for the kids anymore, as it is too much of a bother and is beyond what is required for her school. Most of the students can’t speak English well at all, so they need to practice for weeks before the contest.

I think it’s a terrible method to force people to speak English, and I honestly think it causes much more stress than should be allowed on very young students. I’ve had six and seven year old students trying to memorize entire pages of English dialog. It’s a waste of time, as 90% of all the speech is memorized phonetically without any meaning at all. Hopefully the speeches we have to do this year will be at least as entertaining as this one was.