Public Perception of Interpreters in South Korea: Text Mining Social Media

Abstract

This article investigates the public perception of simultaneous interpreters on social media, namely comments on YouTube and QnA from Naver's Knowledge In (KiN), the largest online Q&A community in South Korea. Co-occurrence analysis and LDA topic modeling were performed on the collected and pre-processed datasets from these sources. The co-occurrence analysis of Naver KiN found the word 'professional' in all clusters of the corpus, confirming a degree of public acceptance of simultaneous interpretation as a professional feat. The word 'professional' showed the most frequent co-occurrence with 'certification'. Co-occurrence analysis of YouTube comments found recurring references to interpreters' skill, passion, personality, and appearance. Interpreters were perceived to have 'elegance', 'grace', 'humility', and 'dignity'. Through this study, we found that the public expects simultaneous interpretation to be a professional practice, even as it is understood through a lens of oversimplification and ambiguity.