Tibetan to Korean: epistemic authority does not select a level of courtesy
Two kinds of authority must not be conflated
Zeisler discusses an idealized Standard Spoken Tibetan distinction involving the speaker’s personal epistemic authority. This concerns a person’s involvement, familiarity, or responsibility for a claim. It does not mean that the speaker occupies a higher social position than the listener. Translating that distinction as Korean deference would change the dimension of meaning being expressed.
The Seoul National University account of Korean honorifics distinguishes plain 나 from humble 저 in first-person reference. A speaker who knows something through personal involvement can still speak humbly to the listener. Conversely, a plain first-person form does not establish that the person learned the information indirectly. Knowledge and interpersonal stance need independent interpretations.
A respectful Tibetan subject is not automatically the addressee
Jäschke’s historical Tibetan grammar describes special words for an honored person’s actions and body. For example, དབུ་ is a respectful counterpart to the ordinary word for head. Such wording can concern a third person being discussed, rather than the person reading or hearing the sentence.
When that third person becomes part of a Korean account, the translator must keep the relationship to the discussed person distinct from the relationship to the audience. A Tibetan report about an honored visitor’s condition should not become a direct address to the visitor merely because both contexts involve respect. The source’s reference, not the presence of an honorific word alone, identifies the participant.
The source of knowledge may need expression beyond the pronoun
Garfield and de Villiers distinguish Tibetan inference based on general information from inference based on a specific perceptible clue. Those analyses concern how the speaker reaches a conclusion. Choosing 저 instead of 나 cannot communicate which sort of inference underlies the source statement.
The same study emphasizes that evidential distinctions need not reduce the force of an assertion. A Korean rendering should therefore not turn every Tibetan inferential claim into an uncertain guess merely because no direct eyewitness is named. Where the distinction matters, convey the basis of the conclusion separately from how courteously the speaker addresses the listener.
A visible you is not required to preserve an address
The SNU account cautions that 당신 has contextual restrictions and that titles often serve where an English translation would display you. A Tibetan respectful pronoun cannot be assigned to 당신 as a universal equivalent. The target choice depends on the actual address relationship, even when the source clearly identifies its listener.
Likewise, a Korean title can maintain the intended addressee without reproducing the source pronoun word for word. This does not authorize substituting the listener for a third-person subject. In Tibetan-to-Korean translation, preserve three separate relationships: who performs the action, who has the relevant knowledge, and whom the message addresses. A single respectful-looking target expression cannot resolve all three, and an appropriate speech style does not by itself preserve the source’s evidential meaning.
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