ScholarWorks@숙명여자대학교

초록

This paper analyzes the cultural meanings generated and transformed during the translation process of the romance fantasy webtoon 「Sister, I’m the Queen in This Life」 and its English translation 「I’m the Queen in This Life」. Utilizing Karen Barad’s agential realism, the discussion centers on webtoon translation as a performative act in which various translation agents intertwine to create meaning. Romance fantasy is a genre that portrays romantic love and women’s subjectivity, offering new narrative possibilities by challenging misogynistic representations in the wake of the feminist reboot. This paper examines how the cultural contexts of a romance fantasy webtoon set in medieval Europe are reconstructed as it reaches a global audience. The way misogynistic expressions are mitigated during the translation process weakens the direct tone of the original text. Simultaneously, interactions with visual texts and the intertextual engagement of English literary traditions generate new layers of meaning. The translation of 「I’m the Queen in This Life」 demonstrates the potential for universal affects, such as the desire for a better life for women, to be reimagined across diverse cultural contexts. While this may be seen as a serendipitous effect of the global cultural market, it also highlights how the interactions among various forces involved in the translation act reveal the possibilities of generating new meanings.

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