The Profession

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Dano said from time to time that buck stops where money is. In other words, the translators and their publishers should take responsibility for their publications, especially when they had sold huge number of copies. Dano thought aloud it's deplorable that the Korean version of Doctors had committed so many translational errors and that even after having been pointed to the errors they hadn't corrected them.

Text:
Indeed a frivolous legend has it that Hippocrates, having grown restless after spending two millennia in the Elysian Fields with the hale and hearty, came back to earth and applied to Harvard Med to observe what progress had been made in (1)the profession since his heyday.

Posing as a straight-A Harvard senior who had scored a perfect eight hundred on the Med Aps and had also run (2)four minutes for the mile, (3)he went serenely confident to his interview. When asked by his interrogator, respected orthopedic surgeon Christopher Dowling, what he considered to be the essential principle of Medicine, Hippocrates confidently quoted himself, "First, do no harm."

He was rejected as unsuitable. (Doctors, Erich Segal, p.85) (the Korean version, p.113)

Dano's comments:
The English prose is the system of relationships. In other words, the English exposition consists of relationships which function as cross-sectional and multi-directional. The translator of the English language publications who belongs to the category of the second language speaker of English should explicate the relationships they are to encounter in the expositions. Still, a considerable portion of so-called Korean translators themselves do not elucidate the relationships in the English writings they are handling. I wish I could show the Korean version.

Of all the relationships of the prose, the substitution arising in the relationships is very important. The pronoun he in the above paragraph of course represents Hippocrates. However, very regrettably, the Korean translator discloses his or her ignorance by grasping the pronoun he as a medical student of Harvard University. The bold-typed the profession of course means the medical job at large. And four minutes for the mile means that the Harvard Med students who have passed the Med Aps should undergo another physical test of the "running of a mile in less than four minutes." (www.google.com)