Books in French are on www.livres-cinema.info
Understanding Korean Film
A Cross-Cultural Perspective
by Jieun Kiaer and Loli Kim
(0 vote)Average rating:
| 0 | rating |  = We can do without |
| 0 | rating |  = Good book |
| 0 | rating |  = Excellent book |
| 0 | rating |  = Unique / a reference |
Your rating: -
Book Presentation:
Film viewing presents a unique situation in which the film viewer is unwittingly placed in the role of a multimodal translator, finding themselves entirely responsible for interpreting multifaceted meanings at the mercy of their own semiotic repertoire. Yet, researchers have made little attempt, as they have for literary texts, to explain the gap in translation when it comes to multimodality. It is no wonder then that, in an era of informed consumerism, film viewers have been trying to develop their own toolboxes for the tasks that they are faced with when viewing foreign language films by sharing information online. This is particularly the case with South Korean film, which has drawn the interest of foreign viewers who want to understand these untranslatable meanings and even go as far as learning the Korean language to do so.
Understanding Korean Film: A Cross-Cultural Perspective breaks this long-awaited ground by explaining the meaning potential of a selection of common Korean verbal and non-verbal expressions in a range of contexts in South Korean film that are often untranslatable for English-speaking Western viewers. Through the selection of expressions provided in the text, readers become familiar with a system that can be extended more generally to understanding expressions in South Korean films. Formal analyses are presented in the form of in-depth discursive deconstructions of verbal and non-verbal expressions within the context of South Korea’s Confucian traditions. Our case studies thus illustrate, in a more systematic way, how various meaning potentials can be inferred in particular narrative contexts.
About the authors:
Jieun Kiaer is professor of Korean Language and Linguistics at the University of Oxford. She publishes widely on East Asian translation, with particular emphasis on Korean translation. Her publications include The Routledge Course in Korean Translation (2018) and Korean Literature through the Korean Wave (with Anna Yates-Lu, 2019). Kiaer is also the series editor for Routledge Studies in East Asian Translation.
Loli Kim is a DPhil researcher in Korean Studies at the University of Oxford. Her work explores multimodal, semantic, and cross-cultural communication, particularly from a Korean perspective. Her current research focuses on the translation of multimodal meaning-making processes in South Korean film that become ‘untranslatable’ for Anglophone European viewers, with special focus on socio-pragmatic verbal and non-verbal behavioural expressions.
See the publisher website: Routledge
> From the same authors:
The Language of Food (2024)
Through the Lens of East Asian Films and Drama
by Jieun Kiaer, Loli Kim and Niamh Calway
> On a related topic:
The Late and Post-Dictatorship (2025)
Cinephilia Boom and Art Houses in South Korea
The South Korean Film Industry (2024)
Dir. Junhyung Cho, Sangjoon Lee and Dal Yong Jin
Impossible Speech (2024)
The Politics of Representation in Contemporary Korean Literature and Film
Cinema under National Reconstruction (2024)
State Censorship and South Korea's Cold War Film Culture
The Korean War and Postmemory Generation (2023)
Contemporary Korean Arts and Films
Back
