romanization – Translation Networks

romanization

Cataloguing Writing Systems of Korean Language Works in HathiTrust, or Why I Wish They Would

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Welcome to My HathiTrust Collection!

One of my life’s great passions is Korean language, so when I was first introduced to HathiTrust, of course I wanted to explore the Korean language sources first. I was impressed with the collection overall, but I found that many of the works were illegible to me because of the writing system used. Korean has two writing systems: Hangeul which is phonetic and is used almost ubiquitously in the modern day, and Hanja which employs Sino-Korean characters (Chinese characters, though many have different meanings than when used in Chinese languages). Hanja was the dominant Korean writing system (for scholarly works in particular) until well into the 20th century. This being the case, many of the Korean works in the HathiTrust collection are written predominantly in Hanja. Though I was surprised to find that several of the works I looked at were written in a combination of scripts. I was further surprised that information on the writing system used is not provided in the metadata for Korean works in HathiTrust. This seems like useful information to provide, as the scripts are vastly different and could impact one’s ability to read the text.  As a monument to these discoveries, I decided to make my HathiTrust collection out of works that use multiple writing systems, in this case Hanja and Hangeul.

View My HathiTrust Collection

An example that well represents my collection is this work from 1924 entitled Kaebyeok (link). It features the use of Hangeul and Hanja mixed together. I found this interesting because I was not expecting to find sources that use both Hangeul and Hanja together so closely.

(For those new to Korean scripts, character blocks with characters that look like: 이것은 한글 예다 are Hangeul)

The first page featured in the screencast shows large sections of Hangeul (most notably in the boxed sections) alongside other words written in Hanja. The second page is purely written in Hanja. (link to pages)

Below is the catalogue entry which contains the metadata about this work. You’ll notice that the language is listed as Korean, but there is no information on the script that is used (beyond the title which is listed in it’s original form in Hanja).

Why Should I Care About Cataloguing the Use of Hanja vs. Hangeul?

For at least two reasons! Firstly, not everyone who speaks Korean can read Hanja, or at least Hanja at the level necessary to fully comprehend some works (it takes a lot more dedicated study than Hangeul). If someone is looking for Korean sources on a certain topic, it would be useful to be able to filter based on the script they can read. Secondly, there is historical and cultural significance to the use of Hanja vs. Hangeul. Hangeul was created in the late 1400s to be an accessible writing system that anyone, regardless of education level, could use. For much of history there were class-related differences between what was written in Hangeul vs. Hanja. If one is looking for historical sources and is curious to see different perspectives, looking for sources written in Hanja vs. in Hangeul could prove useful. Having the ability to filter based on writing system would improve the quality and accessibility of HathiTrust’s Korean language collection.

Connecting to the Sawyer Seminar on Building Translation Networks in the Midwest Using HathiTrust

One lightning talk from the seminar that related to my collection was the “Chinese translation of Bengali prose poems via English” presented by Xiaoxi Zhang. In this talk Xiaoxi discusses how Chinese writing evolved through history in terms of character usage (simplified vs. traditional). Like Korean, the motivation behind implementing the simplified Chinese writing system was to improve public literacy. The result was that many modern works and translations are written using the simplified Chinese writing system. This difference is not catalogued in the metadata of Chinese sources on HathiTrust either. Like with Korean, it would be useful to include this information in Chinese sources because of the influence it has on language comprehension (Xiaoxi mentioned names, particularly transliterated names, as a place where this matters).

If I were to add Kaebyeok (or any work in my collection) to the map of works mentioned in the seminar lightning talks, I would connect it to The Baitál Pachísí. This book features three different writing systems: Hindústání, Nágarí, and English. Aan important distinguishing factor between Kaebyeok and The Baitál Pachísí  is that that the use of three writing systems is mentioned in the metadata for The Baitál Pachísí.

Connecting to Other Blog Posts

One post that this post connects to is “Cataloguing of Works in Japanese and Japanese-Related Languages in HathiTrust” by Kristen. In this post, Kristen focuses on the lack of writing system related cataloging in many Japanese language sources in HathiTrust, much like with Korean. The example discussed provides a mix of Japanese and the Ainu language, it is fascinating to learn about the implications of listing this and other sources as simply “Japanese.”

Another related post is “Translating Chinese” by Yining Zhang. In this post, Yining discusses the translation and transliteration of proper nouns and how the evolution of Chinese writing influenced these practices. This post tied in many of the connections I found with Xiaoxi Zhang’s lightning talk from the Sawyer Seminar.

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Japanese American Experience in WWII

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Link to my HathiTrust collection: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/mb?a=listis&c=758227452

Title Page of “Nisei in Uniform”
Title Page of “The evacuation and relocation of persons of Japanese ancestry during World War II”
These two book titles represent the focus of my HathiTrust collection. My collection looks at the Japanese American experience during WWII including (but not limited to) Japanese American incarceration and Japanese Americans in the U.S. military.

Introduction

As a Japanese American, I have always been interested in the experiences of Japanese Americans during World War II. That is why I decided to focus my collection on this topic. My collection looks at the treatment of Japanese Americans on the home front (mainly at Japanese Incarceration) and their service in the military. Before I started curating this collection, my knowledge on Japanese Americans service in the military was mainly on the 100th Infantry Battalion and the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, since those were the units that my family members had fought in. Therefore the first text that really caught my eye was “Nisei Linguists: Japanese Americans in the Military Intelligence Service during WWII”. It was interesting to read about how essential Japanese Americans were during WWII in Military Intelligence units.

Connections

A Page from “Nisei in Uniform”

I chose this image from the “Nisei in Uniform” book for a couple of reasons. First, the top half of the page is an attention grabbing photo showing the 442nd Regimental Combat Team. The bottom half of the page features photos of three soldiers, all Americans, who volunteered for military service from incarceration camps. My translation network map connects some of my sources (such as this one) with the Library of Congress: Tagore on the lightning talks slide. The Library of Congress source shows the different ways that Rabindranath Tagore’s name is romanized and translated. I saw a connection since with Japanese American names such as the names of these men, the name must be romanized and there are multiple ways to romanize their names (with some variations being more common than others).

I think that Jacky’s collection on “Education in the 1900s in China” can be connected to my collection. There are multiple texts in my collection looking at the education system during World War II. For example, one of the texts in my collection is on Japanese language programs at the University of Michigan during the war, and another is on Army Japanese language schools. My collection also looks at the Japanese American experience in Internment Camps, which includes schools for the children that were incarcerated there. Jacky’s post mentions how people debated whether politics should be discussed about. This discussion about what should be included in the education curriculum is something that would have occurred in Japanese Internment Camps as well.

Sawyer Seminar

In the closing remarks of the Sawyer Seminar, my professor Christi Merrill said that human elements can change the way that we see the connection and histories between different texts. This is something that I experienced in class, since while looking for connections between my collection and my classmates’ collections, I had a difficult time finding a connection to Michael’s collection. However, since Michael is knowledgeable in Sufism (where I am not), Michael was able to find a connection between Sufism and Japanese Incarceration.

Category/Tags Name

I think that one category name that could connect my post with my classmates post is the category of “Historical Events”. Even if their collections are not truly focused on a historical event, there could be a certain event that affects their collection. For example, Kristen mentioned in her blog post that Japanese writing changed from traditionally being written right to left to be written left to right after World War II. Therefore, our collections could be connected in an even smaller category of “World War II”, but even more of our classmates collections could be included in the broader category of “Historical Events”

This screencast highlights a keyword of “Education” which can be connected both to Japanese Incarceration as well as the Military, and it shows three texts in my collection that can be connected to this keyword. As mentioned earlier, when connecting my collection to Jacky’s collection, there were schools in the Interment Camps for Incarcerated children as well as Japanese Language Schools for Military Intelligence at the University of Michigan. I also show how the catalog records of the three texts (The evacuation and relocation of persons of Japanese ancestry during World War II, The Army Japanese language school, and The Japanese language programs at the University of Michigan during World War II) are not tagged to be related to education at all. The second two texts do not have any tags, which can make it difficult for humans to make connections and impossible for bots to make connections between these texts

Important Links

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