번역과 언어유형론

Translation and Language Typology: With a Special Reference to Noun-Oriented vs. Verb-Oriented

This paper discusses the proper procedures to translate the noun-oriented language English, into the verb-oriented language Korean. The linguistic phenomena related to noun-oriented and verb oriented traits are the following three: First, in the introduction of grammatical categories of tense and number, English expresses those objectively, while Korean does so in subjective way according to the speaker’s psychological condition or epistemic modality. Second, English prefers adjective-oriented style, while Korean does adverb-oriented style. Third, for cohesion, English uses pronominalization which is abstract grammatical procedure, while Korean does the repetition of identical nouns. When translating heavy nominal sentences of English into Korean, it is necessary to add predicative elements to surface structure for the naturalness of Korean. In English the plural particle ‘-s’ is suffixed by the identification of real number, the manifestation of noun-oriented trait, while in Korean the plural particle ‘-deul’ is suffixed according to the speaker’s recognition of the given accident, the manifestation of verb-oriented trait.