Vocabulary Similarity Analysis of the Original and Korean Translations of Jane Eyre Using Text Mining Techniques: Focusing on ‘Jane’ and ‘Rochester’

This study aims to compare and analyze the original Jane Eyre with its children’s and adult translations to understand the overall differences by examining vocabulary similarity for the characters ‘Jane’ and ‘Rochester’. For this analysis, we utilized the Gutenberg original text, the adult translation (published by Minumsa), and the children’s illustrated edition. The Skip-gram model was employed as the analysis method, with the English text processed using the NLTK package and the Korean text with the KoNLPy package (Kkma analyzer). The analysis of the top 10 similar words for the key characters, ‘Jane’ and ‘Rochester,’ revealed that, compared to the children’s edition, the adult translation retained greater equivalence with the original. This was observed through subtle nuances in themes such as marriage, love, power, equality, and autonomy, which illustrate Jane's identity and internal conflicts with societal expectations via literary devices.