Well, Sshong, I know what you mean when you find translations of English books into Korean really shoddy. I am a very very comfortable bilinguial, and I was involved in many translation jobs both verbal and text in the past. I came to the conclusion that the reason KOrean translations of ENglish are so poor is 4~1) the difficulty of having exactly the same vocabulkary. THus, concepts in one language are not eaily transferrable to another language. Besides, the tranlator must KNOW the subject that he/she is translating.2) But more important, the translator is not well equiped to understand the culture of the language. He/she misses all the subtle nuances and allusions, the allegory, the metaphores, etc., that the language does not "feel" the same when the translation is over. Unless you are also bicultural or multicultural, it is hard for the translator to be able to transfer one language into another meaningfully. That is why I think the translation schools such as the Hankook Foreign Langucage university's graduate school of tranlation have short comings.