A History of Korean Bible Translation

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A History of Korean Bible Translation

Ji-Youn Cho (Korean Bible Society)

Korean is spoken by nearly 80 million people in South Korea and North Korea, and in China, Japan, Mongolia, Singapore, New Zealand, US, and other countries. It is the national language of both South Korea and North Korea. It is written with the Hangul alphabet, and in a Romanized orthography adopted in South Korea in 2000. The Korean literacy rate is over 98%. Nearly 20% of South Koreas 48 million people belong to Protestant churches, although Christianity in Korea has a history of only little over one century.
The earliest record of a Protestant missionary to Korea is of Karl F. A. Gtzlaff who came in July 1832, commissioned by the Netherlands Bible Society. During one of his first journeys along the coasts of Korea, he translated the Lords Prayer (Matt 6:913) into Korean and distributed prayer books to the Korean people. The first attempt to translate the entire Bible into Korean was undertaken by John Ross in 1873.
The early versions. The Gospel of Luke (1882) and The Corean New Testament (1887). John Ross, a missionary sent to Manchuria by the United Presbyterian Church of Scotland, took up residence in Mukden, The Gate of Korea, in 1872. Ross made the long journey from the port of Newchwang, China, to Mudken, and made contact with Korean merchants in October 1874. In 1878, Ross, Ung-Chan Lee, and some other people from Mukden began working on the Korean translation of the Gospels of Matthew and John. Then Ross went back to Newchwang, China, to work on the Gospel of Luke with Sang-Yun Soh. In addition, in 1879, Ross and his colleague, John MacIntyre, and his Korean translators, Hong-Jun Paik and others, started translating the books of Matthew, Acts, and Romans with the support of the National Bible Society of Scotland. By 1882, the translations of Luke and John were finished and 3,000 copies of each were published in Pongchun, Manchuria, with the support of NBSS. The copies were taken across the Yalu River into northern Korea by colporteurs. Ross and his teams continued to translate Acts (1883), Mark (1884), and Matthew (1884), and combined these portions into The Corean New Testament (CNT 1887), the first Korean translation of the NT. Though official BS translation policy followed the literal approach, Rosss aim was to represent the real sense in idiomatic language. Thus, a literal verbal translation had to wait until Rosss conditions were fulfilled.
The Chinese NT used by Korean translators at the first stage of the translation process may have been the Delegates Version of 1852. Ross and MacIntyre may have used the KJV and RV (1885) as the English text, and the Greek NT. The Greek version was not the Textus Receptus that was popularly used for translations in other languages like Chinese and Japanese, but the Greek NT with the readings adopted by the reviewers of the Authorized Version of E. Palmer (1881).
Rosss anticipated readers were not Korean scholars but rather the common people, including women, who could not read or write Chinese but only Korean. Accordingly, the translation of the NT was integral not only for the establishment of Korean churches all over the Korean peninsula, but also for the rediscovery of the value of the Korean written alphabet, which had been neglected under the tradition of honoring the Chinese above Korean.
The Gospel according to Mark (1885). In 1885, a new version of the Gospel of Mark, translated by the Korean scholar Su-Jung Lee, was published in Japan with the support of ABS. Before translating Scripture into Korean, he began to add the Korean endings to the Chinese text in 1883, and his work on the Sino-Corean edition of the NT, the Kuntan-Corean New Testament, was completed within two months. However, because the Korean translation of the NT was more urgently required than the Sino-Corean edition of the NT, he completed his first translated text of Mark in 1885.
His previous work on the Sino-Corean version and the principle terms and concepts, which were written with Chinese characters, greatly influenced this translation. Also, since Su- Jung Lee was involved in the evangelism of Korean students in Japan, his translation style lent itself to classical and archaic language in order to reach Korean intellectuals who were familiar with Chinese. The first two American missionaries, Henry G. Appenzeller and Horace G. Underwood, obtained a copy of this version in Japan before they arrived in Korea in 1885. The complete versions.
The Korean Bible (1911). Translation of the first entire Bible into Korean began in 1887 by the Permanent Executive Bible Committee, which was made up of American and British missionaries. In 1895 the Bible Committee was reconstituted and the Board of Official Translators was appointed on the recommendation of A. Kenmure, the resident agent of BFBS. From 1887 to 1911, eleven missionaries and at least eleven Korean translators participated in the translation project as members of the Board of Official Translators. The translation principle they adopted was again the literal translation approach which was applied to the translation of the both the NT and the OT. The translation of the OT began in 1897 while the translation of the NT was still underway. Since the translation of the NT had to be done promptly, each book of the OT was assigned to different translators in 1899. The entire NT was published in 1900, revised in 1904, and further revised in 1906. The OT was combined with the Korean NT (1906) and was published as the first complete Korean Bible (KB 1911). Since the anticipated reader of the KB was the general public, the style was simple but also sufficiently stylish so that it would commend itself to the scholarly. The 1911 KB had word spacing and followed the contemporary standard of Korean grammar while still adhering to the traditional practice of not using punctuation marks. The KB, which followed the structures and literary text styles of the 19 c., influenced the coming Korean versions read by most Protestant Christians as the liturgical Bible.
Korean Revised Version (1938/1952/1961) and New Korean Revised Version (1998). Immediately after publishing the 1911 KB, the Board of Official Translators was re-named the Board of Official Revisers, and it was their job to polish the KB. The first Korean revision, the Revised Version of the Korean Bible (KRV), was published in 1938. Because the translation followed a rigid literal translation approach, words which were not from the source text but were included to make sentences natural, were formatted as small letters (much like the italicized words of the KJV). This version became the Authorized Version used most widely in the Korean churches.
After Koreas liberation from Japan in 1945, Korean linguists abolished the old orthographic system and established a new one in its place. Despite the outbreak of war between North and South Korea in 1950, the translation project was able to continue. The Korean Bible Society, which transitioned from being a branch of BFBS to becoming an autonomous, independent Bible Society in 1947, went ahead with plans of revision for 1952 and 1961. Spelling was corrected in the Korean Revised Version, Hangul Edition (1952) according to rules of Korean orthography and this edition was further revised first in 1956, and again in 1961 with changes in 815 wordings in the KRV. In response to the demand for an updated version since the early 1980s, KBS organized a revision committee and from 1983 to 1988 prepared a draft revision. In 1991, the Board of KBS set revision rules for the New Korean Revised Version (NKRV 1998). NT revision was completed in 1994, and 2,000 copies of the tentative revision were published for consultation purposes in 1997. Critical opinions from 1,600 people in various social fields were delivered to the Supervisory Committee of Revision for KRV, and after review, were incorporated into the final revision. The NKRV was published in 1998 with the revision of 12,823 wordings in the NT and 59,889 wordings in the OT. The NKRV was officially accepted by most Protestant denominations as the church Bible in 2000, though its widespread usage has taken a little more time.
The NKRV, however, still does not employ any punctuation, i.e., periods, commas, and quotation marks to distinguish between dialogue and narration. The NKRV was put together according to the archaic styles of the KB (1911). Such styles remain remarkably steadfast and were practically uninfluenced by the rapid linguistic changes that took place in society in the last century. The new translations.
The Korean New Testament, New Translation (1967). In March 1960, KBS organized the Revision Management Committee (actually, New Translation Management Committee) consisting of six professors of NT studies at seminaries or universities from various church denominations. The Korean NT, New Translation was published in 1967. The translation project began as an effort to reach the needs of non-Christians, especially young people under the age of 30 that made up over 70% of the South Korean population at the time. The goal of this new translation was to provide a Bible translation for potential new Christians who had at least a middle school education. It tried to strike a balance between literal and free translation, and it included punctuation markers like question marks, quotation marks, commas, periods, and clear paragraph divisions as found in contemporary literature and textbooks. However, opposition arose against the new translation due to the perception that the authority of the Bible originated from the ambiguity of expressions. Still, despite opposition, the effort to propose a new version as the representative liturgical Bible continues.
Common Translation of the Holy Bible (1977/1999). Given the favorable stance adopted by the Roman Catholic toward Bible translation at the Second Vatican Council in 1965, and with the signing of an agreement between the UBS and the Vatican, Guidelines for Interconfessional Cooperation in Translating the Bible (1968, 1987 rev.), a project for a common language translation was initiated through interconfessional cooperation. The interconfessional committee for the translation of the OT was made up of six scholars from the Protestant and Roman Catholic Churches in February 1968. In January 1969, seven scholars who were recommended by the participating churches were assigned to the NT translation project. Four members were later selected for the translation of the Deuterocanon and four Korean linguists and grammarians edited the drafts. Translation principles were established for the dynamic equivalence approach in modern language with the intention of replacing the traditional terms used by the Protestant and Catholic Church with modern phrases. The Common Translation of the New Testament (1971) and the Common Translation of the Holy Bible (CTHB) were published by KBS in 1971 and 1977 respectively.
CTHB was accepted by Roman Catholic readers and used widely for ritual and Bible studies but many Protestant Christians rejected it because they were used to reading the older versions. Interestingly, the North Korean government re-edited the OT of this version in 1983 and the NT in 1984 according to the North Korean spelling rules and published 10,000 copies of each version. CTHB was revised again in 1999 at the request of the Catholic Church. This revision maintained the characteristics of the first edition with minor spelling corrections according to the current rules of Korean orthography. The re-editing of the order of the deuterocanonical materials according to the sequence of the Nova Vulgata Bibliorum Sacrorum (1986) was done at the request of the Catholic Bishops Conference of Korea. In 2005, the Bishops Conference published The Holy Bible as the new translation following the literal translation approach. This version is currently used as the liturgical Bible in Korean Catholic churches. New Korean Standard Version (1993/2001). In the 1980s the ministers and laypersons of the Korean Protestant churches asked KBS to do a new translation to replace the 1961 KRV, which was being used by most Protestant churches. They requested that it be a completely new translation respecting the conservative tradition of Korean Protestant churches and not a revision or corrected version of any established translation. Since 1983, sixteen biblical scholars participated in the project as translators, 8 Korean grammarians and linguists as stylists, 5 church leaders as supervisors, and 980 ministers and theologians as consultants. In February 1993, the New Korean Standard Version (NKSV) translated into standard contemporary Korean was published.
The expected readers were teenagers and people in their twenties, i.e., the largest demographic group in Korea. Since the purpose of for the translation was both for use in the liturgy and for Christian education, the style it adopted did not follow the archaic style of the KRV but rather the contemporary vernacular style. NKSV intentionally used easier words and removed gender discriminative expressions, vulgar expressions (e.g., Exod 2:8; 1 Kgs 3:1617), and discriminative expressions for handicapped persons.
The translation principle aimed to benefit from the merits of the formal correspondence approach and dynamic equivalence approach while dismissing the disadvantages of both concepts (NKSV preface). The translators adhered to the formal correspondence approach, which seeks to match the grammar of the translation as closely as possible to the source languages, and also adopted the dynamic equivalence approach for passages that would otherwise lose nuance and meaning in translation. The translation process faithfully followed the UBS guidelines and the finest scholars and the most efficient translation procedures were mobilized for the translation of the NKSV. The version was highly appreciated by many biblical scholars and linguists who regarded it as the best translation of the day and was accepted by many denominations as their church Bible. However, just like the other new translations, it was also denounced by some church leaders from conservative churches and an NKSV revision committee was organized nine months after it was published. The revision, the Revised New Korean Standard Version (RNKSV) was published in 2001 and is currently the most recent Korean translation. For this project, KBS gathered the opinions of a great many readers and reviewed them extensively in consultation with the members of the revision committee. The RNKSV is currently being used by Korean Protestant churches to educate adolescents about the Bible. Additional reading: Cho 2009; Oak and Yi 2004, 2006; So 1993. Ji-Youn Cho