Bureau of Interpreters


The Bureau of Interpreters or Sayŏgwŏn was an agency of the Joseon government of Korea from 1393 to 1894 responsible for training and supplying official interpreters.
Textbooks for foreign languages produced by the Bureau are valuable sources on the history of the various languages.

History

In a country surrounded by linguistically distinct neighbours, Korean diplomacy has always relied on interpreters.
They were a vital part of the national foreign policies of sadae 'serving the great' and gyorin 'neighbourly relations'.
King Chungnyeol of Goryeo established the T'ongmun'gwan in 1276 to train interpreters in Chinese and Mongolian.
In 1393, the second year of the Joseon dynasty, the Bureau of Interpreters was established as part of the Ministry of Rites.
Regulations stipulated that its director would be an official of the principal third rank.
The Bureau operated until 1894, when it was abolished as part of the modernization drive.

Languages

A memorial from 1394 mentions instruction in Chinese and Mongolian.
The most important and most taught language was always Chinese, reflecting Korea's key foreign relationship and the sadae policy.
Each year, three of four delegations were sent to the Chinese court, including about 20 official interpreters.
Some of the most promising students were included, to give them immersive practice.
The study of Mongolian had originally been introduced when Goryeo was a vassal state of the Mongol Yuan dynasty, but after the collapse of the Mongol empire, Joseon Korea had few dealings with the Mongols.
However, Mongolian language skills were retained as a strategic measure, in case the Mongols should again rise and threaten Korea.
Japanese and Jurchen became regular subjects in 1414 and 1426 respectively.
Together, these were known as the 'four studies', with Jurchen later being succeeded by Manchu.
The Jianzhou Jurchen invaded Korea in 1627 and 1637, before overthrowing the Ming in 1644 and establishing the Qing dynasty in China.
From then on, the Manchu language was ranked next to Chinese by the Bureau.

Interpreters

The bureau was responsible for training interpreters, with about 100 students in the 15th century, increasing to over 200 in the 18th century,
In addition, branch schools were established near the frontiers in the early 15th century:
A school was established on Jeju Island in 1671, teaching Chinese and Japanese.
There were no local schools for Mongolian until the late 19th century, as there were no Korean contacts with the Mongols.
The bureau administered the interpreter's examination, one of the gwageo.
The examinations for the technical professions – interpretation, medicine, astronomy and law – were considered of lower status than the literary examination and disparaged as "miscellaneous".
As with the other categories, regular examinations occurred every three years, but there were also special examinations at various times.
The examination for each language began with a preliminary stage, from which the best performers advanced to a "re-examination" stage for final selection of a prescribed number of interpreters.
Each stage consisted of two parts, a test and a translation of part of the Joseon legal code.
Local examinations were offered in Chinese only, in the three cities on the route to China.
The profession of interpreter was continually denigrated by officials of the dominant yangban class.
Various kings, mindful of the need for skilled interpreters, sought to raise the status of the profession, both by encouraging yangban youths to become interpreters and trying to elevate interpreters to yangban status.
Both policies failed, but the supply of interpreters was maintained through regulations requiring provincial governors to supply talented youths for training.
The social status of interpreters was eventually resolved through the formation of the chungin class for the technical professions in the 17th century, after which the profession was largely hereditary.

Publications

The bureau produced a series of multilingual dictionaries, glossaries and textbooks.
These works were repeatedly revised or replaced to keep up with changes in the target languages during five centuries.
They are valuable sources on the history of Korean and the other four languages.
There was a glossary for each of the foreign languages: the Yŏgŏ yuhae for Chinese, Mongŏ yuhae for Mongolian, Waeŏ yuhae for Japanese, and Tongmun yuhae for Manchu.
In addition, the Han Ch'ŏng mun'gam was a glossary of Chinese, Korean and Manchu.
The Pangŏn chipsŏk covered Korean and all four of the foreign languages.
In choosing textbooks, the focus was on fluency in the spoken language.
Where foreign works were used, vernacular literature or elementary school texts were preferred to scholarly literature written in formal language.
In other cases, new conversational texts were produced.
Successful texts were translated into other languages.
Early textbooks contained only a foreign text, but after the introduction of the Hangul alphabet in 1446, they were annotated with pronunciations in Hangul and glossed in colloquial Korean.
The prescribed textbooks for colloquial Chinese were the Nogŏltae and Pak T'ongsa, both originally written in the 14th century.
The Nogŏltae consists of dialogues focussed on Korean merchants travelling to China, while the Pak T'ongsa is a narrative text covering Chinese society and culture.
They were annotated and revised many times over the centuries, including by Choe Sejin in the early 16th century.
In these texts, each Chinese character was annotated with two pronunciations, a 'vulgar sound' on the right representing the contemporary Mandarin pronunciation, and a 'correct sound' on the right giving the pronunciation codified in Chinese rhyme dictionaries such as the Hóngwǔ Zhèngyùn.
The Kyŏngsŏ Chŏng'ŭm consists of several Chinese classics annotated with pronunciations but not translations.
Students of Chinese were required to study these because interpreters sent to the Chinese court were likely to interact with high-ranking scholar-officials.
The Oryun chŏnbi ŏnhae, based on the Ming drama Wǔlún Quánbèi by Qiu Jun, was also used in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.
Documents mention several early textbooks of Japanese, but the only one to have survived is a 1492 printing of the Irop'a.
For several others, it is possible to identify Japanese elementary school textbooks on which they were based.
In 1676, all of these texts were discarded and replaced with the Ch'ŏphae Sinŏ.
This book and its revisions remained the sole official Japanese text for the following two centuries.
More than 20 textbooks of Mongolian are mentioned in various regulations, but most have not survived.
The two extant texts are 1790 editions of the Mongŏ Nogŏltae and Ch'ŏphae Mongŏ, Mongolian translations of the Nogŏltae and Ch'ŏphae Sinŏ respectively.
Jurchen textbooks are first mentioned in a regulation from 1469.
They were presumably written in the Jurchen script, but none have survived in that form.
Two of them, both stories about children, are preserved in Manchu revisions from 1777, the Soa-ron and P'alse-a.
More important Manchu texts were the Ch'ŏngŏ Nogŏltae, a translation of the Nogŏltae, and the Samyŏk Ch'onghae, based on a Manchu translation of the Ming Romance of the Three Kingdoms.