본문 바로가기
  • Home

A Critical review of a translation strategy for plural human noun phrases in English-to-Korean translation

Euiyon Cho 1

1동국대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This paper critically examines a translation strategy for plural noun phrases in English-to-Korean translation which has been proposed by Kwak and Chin (2011). Since their translation strategy concerning human plural noun phrases is based on a linguistic hypothesis, in this paper, first, I argue that the linguistic hypothesis called ambiguity hypothesis concerning plural and singular interpretation of Korean human noun phrases without the Korean plural marker ‘-tul’ is invalid. It appears that Korean noun phrases with the plural marker or any plural quantifier allow only singular interpretation when they are given a definite interpretation. It will be better to assume that singular or plural interpretation of the so-called unmarked Korean noun phrase is contextually determined. Secondly, it is shown that the translation strategy, when applied for some authentic translation data, produces a mistranslation and therefore it must be discarded. It appears that English plural human nouns must be translated with Korean plural marker ‘-tul’ when they are contextually interpreted to be definite. What is suggested in this study is that any translation strategies, if needed, must be problem-centered to solve concerned translation problems occurring or to occur in translation process, not to be linguistically motivated to bridge any structural differences between source and target languages.

Journal Copyright Policy

No CCL information provided

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2025 are currently being built.