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Adverbial Position in English-Korean Translation: Strategies for Avoiding Structural Ambiguity

Won Eun-ha 1

1신구대학교

Accredited

ABSTRACT

This paper examines adverbial position in English-Korean translation. Korean adverbials are known to be abundant, easy to generate, and positioned relatively freely. Many adjectives, noun phrases, and prepositional phrases as well as adverbial phrases in source texts can be converted into adverbials without much effort and the results are usually satisfactory. But the opposite word order of translated sentences and more strict position of Korean modifiers often produce “Adv1+V2+V1”-type word order. It obstructs appropriate phrase parsing, for Adv1 and V2 are closer than Adv and V1 are. It is possible to misread the structure as Adv1 modifies V2. In order to avoid misunderstanding this structure, three strategies are proposed: to rearrange word orders, putting Adv1 between V2 and V1, to adjust syntactic structure, changing V2 into a noun phrase, and to add comma after Adv1. These approaches break the wrong connection between Adv1 and V2 and help parse translated sentences correctly and effectively.

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.