This is the study of expletive in Korean translation of the Biographies in the Records of the Grand Historian. There are more than 400 expletives used in those Biographies. The usage of expletive is more different and complicated than the number of expletives. It is difficult to translate expletives because expletives don’t have exact meanings like content words. Can we find any rules such as continuing lots of translation errors of these specific expletives? Three Korean translations were chosen for this research. The problems in the expletive translations were found through analytical researches. I expect that this research result applies to other classical literatures.
Keywords: Records of the Grand Historian, Records of the Grand Historian – Biographies, expletives, Sima Qian, translation