Earticle

The purpose of this study is to investigate how subjects in a Korean text are translated into an English text. The analyzed texts are a South Korean presidential speech on biohealth industry in Korean and its English translation. From a linguistic typological perspective, Korean is thought to be both subject-prominent and topic-prominent, and English is considered subject-prominent. This means that subjects are frequently omitted in Korean as situation-bound expressions are preferred, while most English sentences must have subjects because of their subject-centered sentence constructions. It is suspected that these differences lead to numerous translation shifts between the two languages. In order to make the analysis consistent, the criteria on which to determine the subject in both languages are discussed. Once the criteria are defined, English sentences whose subjects are equivalent or different to those of their original sentences are extracted to understand the details of the translation shifts.

The purpose of this study is to examine the concept and the universal of the middle voice and find the similarities and differences between the middle voice in Korean and the middle voice in French. The definition of ‘voice’ in this study is “the category indicating the flow of the force the agent has and the direction of that force.” In ancient Indo-Euroupean, there were two voices, active one and middle one, and as times went on, the middle voice has been developed into the passive voice, resulting in three voices as they are. As a cross-linguistic phenomenon, the middle voice is one in which the subject is not an agent but a patient without any passive marker or even if it is an agent, it is a patient at the same time. That is, the action the subject does goes back to the subject again. There are three voices, active, middle and passive voice both in Korean and French. All these three voices are defined depending on if there is “force” and if it is, where it comes from and where it is directed. There are four subcategories in Korean and three subcategories in French. The middle marker in Korean is sometimes the same as the passive marker, which bring about some confusion. In French, although ‘se’, the middle marker seems not to bring about the confusion between voices, it has so many functions that it also does. As a result, it is safe to say that there is any independent middle voice marker in both languages. In addition to that, as the passive and middle are related, one can mistake one for the other. For resolving this problem, there are some ways to distinguish the two. One of them is to add ‘Agent-adjuct’. Agent-adjunct cannot be in the middle voice sentences. Other one is to examine the aspects of two voices. The middle voice tends to have duration or repetition while the passive voice tends to have resultative or perfective.

This study aims to identify the grammatical properties and meaning of the English plural marker -s and the Korean plural marker -tul and how their differences can cause challenges in English to Korean translation. In order to reach this goal, the present writer compares -tul and -s in terms of the three aspects: marked tul vs unmarked tul, errors in meaning and individuality vs collectivity. By analyzing plural expressions in English newspaper articles and their Korean translations, this study seeks to provide the following suggestions for English to Korean translation. First, in general, unmarked plural nouns tend to be more natural in Korean. Second, when unmarked plural can cause significant misunderstanding in meaning, the Korean nouns referring to plural objects should be accompanied by -tul. Finally, plurality may or may not be marked by -tul in Korean, and both forms differ in semantic meaning. Plural nouns with -tul emphasize individuality whereas unmarked plural nouns implicate collectivity in contexts.

The purpose of this study is to clarify the grammaticalization of Russian verb давать/дать from dative verb to causative verb and also to compare its semantic functions and syntactic characteristics with Korean auxiliary verb ə/ɑ juda. At the beginning both verbs were just dative verbs, but in course of time they have acquired different meanings such as benefit, permission and so on. In the context of syntactic functions, combinatorial restrictions were mainly examined, especially that there are only perfective verbs after the dative verb davat’/dat’.

In this paper, I want to identify the typological differences and similarities between Korean and Arabic, focusing on the relative clauses. First, a general linguistic typological analysis of relative clauses is presented, then the characteristics of relative clauses in Korean and Arabic is analyzed according to that criteria. In conclusion, the differences between two languages are summarized. Word order, relativization strategies and noun phrase accessibility hierarchy are key factors that explain differences between languages in typological point of view. So, I tried to identify the differences and commonalities focusing on these three aspects and briefly present translation errors resulting from grammatical differences between two languages.