한국어 속담의 영어 기계번역에 미치는 격조사의 영향—구글번역기를 중심으로—

Abstract

Kim, Kyungsook. (2018). The influence of Case markers on the machine-translation of Korean proverbs into English. The Linguistic Association of Korea Journal, 26(3), 139-157. This study investigates the influence of case markers on the machine-translation of Korean proverbs into English. While grammatical roles are determined by the word order in English, they are indicated by case markers in Korean. The problem is that Korean case markers are optionally deleted. It is, therefore, hypothesized that the presence of case markers in the original text is to be crucially important to the success rate of machine-translation from Korean into English. For this study, the characteristics of Google Translate, the translation system used here, were first surveyed. Then, sentences from three different categories of Korean texts (spoken, written, and proverb texts) were chosen and machine-translated using Google Translate. The findings are as follows. First, the Korean-English machine-translation of three different text types shows that there were more syntactic errors than lexical errors across the categories. Second, there were more errors in complex sentences than in simplex sentences. Third, the error rate was highest in the proverb category and lowest in the written text category. Fourth, across the three categories, the error rate was the highest when deletion of case markers or multi-case markers was involved. Lastly, the supplement of missing case markers to the original Korean proverbs substantially enhanced the success rate of machine-translation. This shows that the presence of case markers plays a crucial role in machine-translation into English, which, in turn, suggests that we can improve the success rate of machine-translation from Korean into English if we add the missing case markers to the Korean input sentences.