영한번역에서 나타나는 서술어 증가 현상과 구조적 중의성의 문제

Increase in Verb Phrases and the Problem of Structural Ambiguity in English-Korean Translation

The typological differences between English and Korean have led to various English-Korean translation strategies. Especially, it is notable that noun phrases in English tend to be translated into verb phrases in Korean. The main factor is that English is an object-dominant language, while Korean is an action-dominant language. The virtue of this strategy is naturalness of the style. The increase in the number of verb phrases in translated sentences, however, can pose a problem. The verb phrases produced from English noun phrases are usually incomplete in the way that they miss some constituents such as a subject. If these phrases are put in the middle of a matrix clause, structural ambiguity can arise between these phrases and some constituents of the matrix clause. Therefore, parsing these phrases goes wrong and results in misunderstanding of the whole sentence. To avoid this problem, two strategies are proposed: rearranging word order and avoiding new verb phrases. When the translation strategy for naturalness is used, the ambiguity factor should be considered in order to enhance the readability and accuracy of the target text.