This study aims to investigate the three language versions of French Jules Verne(1828-1905)’s Two Years’ Vacation(Deuxans de vacances, 1888) in early Asian modern era, which are Japanese Fifteen Boys(1896) by Morita Shiken, Chinese Fifteen Little ...
This study aims to investigate the three language versions of French Jules Verne(1828-1905)’s Two Years’ Vacation(Deuxans de vacances, 1888) in early Asian modern era, which are Japanese Fifteen Boys(1896) by Morita Shiken, Chinese Fifteen Little Heroes(1902) by Liang Qichao, and Korean Fifteen Little Heroes by Min Jun-ho(1912). In this research, I look at what is pursued in the translation process through the translation methods and intentions of translators under the different cultural environment of Korea, China, and Japan, and explores the context and situation in which intervention, subversion, transformation, and distortion occurs. Finally I partially examine the process of changing styles of newly constructed national languages of each country with the identity of modern nation state.
The Korean version by Min Jun-ho provides the novelty of the story to Korean readers who are not accustomed to adventure stories through translation, rather than simply for the purpose of translating Western novels. Liang Qichao’s Fifteen Little Heroes was translated as a form of a serial novel which is familiar with Chinese readers. In this Chinese version, the narrator set as a storyteller is not only involved in the content of the story and the form of the sentences, but also intervenes in the narrative of the novel to constantly interpret and explain the story. This is for Liang Qichao’s Fifteen Little Heroes’ taking precedence over the political purpose of creating a “citizen” for enlightenment and reformation that awakened the Chinese and made them a new people. Morita Shiken hopes for a new Japanese modern language by using defamiliarization as a translation strategy, trying to preserve the language and culture of the English text as a source language. It can be said, after the process, that the Japanese sentences equipped with the unity of speech and writing in Japan as a nation state has been completed.