도둑이 제발 저린다
thief-SUBJ most-definitely fall-asleep-PRES
The thief most defnitely falls asleep.
“A guilty conscience needs no accuser.” This is to say, the thief gives himself away, maybe. I’m not sure what that means about the thief falling asleep – there is a sort of karmic conception where in people who do bad things suffer health problems – is that what’s going on here?
Grammatically (or rather, lexically), I wonder about 제발. All three Korean-English dictionaries I consulted gave “Please” or a more strong “For god’s sake” as the only possible translation of this term, but my intuition was that it didn’t mean that, here. So I looked in the online Korean-Korean dictionary (the same dictionary, by the way, that I most frequently use the Korean-English part at: daum.net), and found the following additional meaning for 제발: “[반어적인 구문에 쓰여] 어떤 일이 있더라도 반드시.” Roughly, this seems to mean: “[used ironically] surely most definitely.” This kind of ironical “most definitely” seems to be exactly the meaning called for here.
Why are Korean-English dictionaries so bad? I understand that they’re all bad in basically the same way, since they all copy each other. But why was the original one that everyone is copying so bad, and why is there no stepwise incentive to improve the copies?
Incidentally, speaking of bad translation, sometimes after puzzling through the meanings of these proverbs, I will plug them into the googletranslate out of curiosity. The result of putting this one in was exceptionally amusing. Googletranslate gave “Please find my overcoat thief.”