Pyongyang, the Center of Socialism: North Korea’s Initiative to Translate Korean Texts into Foreign Languages

This study explores the North Korean initiative to translate Korean writing into foreign languages from the mid-1940s to the early 1970s. Between 1945 and the mid-1960s, the North Korean government focused on the translation of Soviet texts, such as Lenin’s Collected Works, into Korean. The North Korean elite attempted to learn about Soviet culture and Marxism-Leninism by translating books and magazines from Russian into Korean. They accepted, rejected, or transformed elements of Soviet culture and Marxism-Leninism and applied them to their own context. At the same time, the North Korean leadership launched a Korean-to-foreign language translation project to introduce North Korean texts such as Kim Il Sung’s writings to Third World countries. When Kim Il Sung promulgated the Juche idea while visiting Indonesia in 1965, the focus of the North Korean leadership moved from Russian-to-Korean translation to Korean-to-foreign language translation. Previous studies have seen translation in North Korea as a way of importing written texts from the outside world, particularly the Soviet Union. However, this study sheds light on translation as a practice of exporting culture, ideas, and knowledge to the world, notably to the Third World.