page_title: Bureau of Interpreters
section_title: Publications
hierarchical_section_title: Bureau of Interpreters / Publications
caption_attribution_description: 日本語: 『捷解新語 本文・国語索引・解題』京都大学国語国文学会、1957年。のコピーをスキャンし、更につぎはぎ等の加工。
context_page_description: 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.
context_section_description: 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 (譯語類解) for Chinese, Mongŏ yuhae (蒙語類解) for Mongolian, Waeŏ yuhae (倭語類解) for Japanese, and Tongmun yuhae (同文類解) for Manchu.
  In addition, the Han Ch'ŏng mun'gam (漢清文鑑) was a glossary of Chinese, Korean and Manchu.
  The Pangŏn chipsŏk (徐命膺編) 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 (usually Chinese).
  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 ('Old Cathayan') and Pak T'ongsa ('Pak the interpreter'), 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 (洪武正韻).
  The Kyŏngsŏ Chŏng'ŭm (經書正音) 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 (伍倫全備諺解), based on the Ming drama Wǔlún Quánbèi by Qiu Jun (丘濬), 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 (named after the Iroha presentation of the Japanese syllabary, with which the work begins).
  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 ('Rapid Understanding of a New Language').
  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 (小兒論, 'Discussions of the Child') and P'alse-a (八歳兒, 'Eight-year-old Boy').
  More important Manchu texts were the Ch'ŏngŏ Nogŏltae (清語老乞大), a translation of the Nogŏltae, and the Samyŏk Ch'onghae (三譯總解), based on a Manchu translation of the Ming Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
caption: The Ch'ŏphae Sinŏ (1676), a textbook of Japanese
exif: {"Image ExifOffset": "10720", "Thumbnail ImageWidth": "200", "Thumbnail ImageLength": "139", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "8", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "10694", "EXIF ImageWidth": "200", "EXIF ImageLength": "139", "EXIF Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "EXIF Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "EXIF JPEGInterchangeFormat": "8", "EXIF JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "10694"}