영한번역 작품에 나타난 관계사 what과 의문사 what의 오류 분석

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to address the problem of the semantic errors involving the English relative what and interrogative what that appear in English-to-Korean translation patterns. Despite the semantic and syntactic differences between the two forms, they are used unclearly in translated texts. This paper accounts for the properties of and differences between the two usages of what. It utilizes the approaches by some linguists to demonstrate those properties and differences. First, we investigate how both types of what are the translated texts into Korean. The relative what is translated in Korean texts as bounded nouns, but also as unbounded nouns. However, we find some instances that are properly translated. In particular, the rate of improperly translated relative what is higher than that of interrogative what. Moreover, we show that semantic ambiguities and translation errors appear because the specific differences between the English relative what and the interrogative what are not made clear in English-to-Korean translated texts. This produces unsatisfying translation results, which is far from the original writer’s intentions. We apply the approaches to sentences in which the two forms are difficult to distinguish. We have found that the approaches each can be effective. The problem of ensuring the faithfulness and readability is not easily solved, but this paper shows that there are certain alternative grammatical mechanisms that can be employed. We conclude that it is poor translation practice to omit the original phrases arbitrarily to make target Korean texts readable. Translators need to try to prevent distortions of source English texts by, for example, reducing the occurrence semantic errors.