2011, Vol.12, No.1

The Journal of Translation Studies 2023 KCI Impact Factor : 1.49

pISSN : 1229-795X
https://journal.kci.go.kr/kats

Much linguistic evidence shows that the notion of natural atomicity, which applies to atoms in the real world, should be distinguished from semantic atomicity, which is for atoms in semantics. This distinction provides a theoretical basis that semantic plurality may not be used to represent a plural number of objects. The plural morpheme ‘-s’ in English is mainly used to represent the plurality of objects while the semantic role of ‘-tul’ in Korean is divided between plurality and distributivity. Thus, nouns referring to plural objects may not be accompanied by ‘-tul,’ and nouns with -‘tul’ may not be related with the plurality of their references in Korean. According to earlier theories on Korean plurality, nouns referring to humans are count nouns whereas the other categories of nouns are more likely to be used as mass nouns. Hence, the occurrence of ‘-tul’ basically represents plurality with human nouns but distributivity with non-human nouns. Based on the distinct semantics of ‘-tul,’ three translational strategies are suggested for plural nouns. First, plural human nouns in English are translated to nouns with or without ‘-tul’ in Korean. Second, non-human plural nouns in English are translated to nouns with ‘-tul’ only when they implicate strong individuality in texts. Finally, the plurality of non-human nouns in English is instantiated in diverse ways in Korean when plurality itself makes a crucial role in text interpretation.

This paper aims to show that relevance theory provides an important framework for translators when they add information in the translated material to enhance the understanding of the target readers. When the source language (SL) readers share more common knowledge with the source text (ST) author than the target text (TT) readers do, translators adjust the informativity gap with the following methods: (a) explanation within the text; (b) explanation in parenthesis within the text; (c) explanation by a translator's note within the text; (d) explanation by footnote; (e) explanation in a glossary(Kirk 2001: 137). This paper analyzed the cases of explanation by a translator's note and explanation by footnote to see if added information provided by a translator has the largest contextual effects and costs the least processing efforts(Gutt 2000: 31). Expressions with strong cultural background and different language use were collected and analyzed from five literary texts; typical problems in added information in terms of the level of relevance were found. The author made an adjustment to the translator's note or footnote of 10 problematic translation cases. Then to see whether the texts with higher level of contextual relevance and less processing efforts enhance the understanding of the TT readers, 27 students from the author's translation class at Sookmyung Women's University were surveyed. The students were asked to read comparative translated texts as TT readers and to choose texts which increas their understanding of context more effectively. The results showed that readers found added information with high level of relevance was far more understandable and closely related to their cognitive background knowledge.

This paper aims at complementing some limitations of the results derived from the statistical analysis—it is a quantitative method—by using the parallel corpus composed of English-original texts and Korean translated texts—it is a qualitative method. The results discussed so far are as follows:The traits of Korean translated texts acquired by comparing Korean translated texts with English original texts, could be summarized into two terms, explicitation and normalization. In a more concrete sense, the translation technique of selective explicitation were applied in the case of Korean bound noun-related sentences and Korean conjunctive adverbs-related sentences; and that of structural explicitation, in the case of Korean long-form causative constructions. In addition, the normalization, which is a kind of translation universals, were consistently revealed in Korean translated phrases related to English punctuation, dash. Based on the above discussions, we have named the traits of Korean translated texts as ‘those of interlanguage’, and proposed some sets of adjustment rules, which are applied after the first translation, towards the mutual approaching of translated and non-translated, normal language.