The Drama in the Sentence: Sequence as a Crucial Challenge for Literary Translation from and to Korean

Author(s):  
Andreas Schirmer

In translation, carefully-crafted sentences are exposed to myriad dangers. This is because translators tend to prioritize syntactical fidelity at the expense of sequence, that is, the order of elements insofar as this relates to calculated progression, gradual disclosure of information, and cumulative development of meaning. But if sequence is turned around for the sake of fluency (conforming to the target language’s ostensibly “natural” word order), the reader’s experience changes as well. Through a set of examples drawn from English translations of Korean fiction, this article demonstrates that the common disregard for sequence is tantamount to a neglect of drama and suspense, of narrative perspectivation, of rhetorical sophistication and cognitive effect. But we also see that by favoring functional equivalence over imitation of grammatical dependencies, it is perfectly possible to allow the reader to process all information at a pace that is analogous to that of the original. Our findings provide insights that are of significance for other language pairings as well.

Author(s):  
Natal'ya Yu. Gvozdetskaya ◽  

The paper is an attempt to analyze the methods of representing specific features of the language of the Old English poem Beowulf in the Russian literary translation of Vladimir Tikhomirov: alliterative collocations, synonymic groups, compounds and epic variations. These specific features of Old English poetic language are rendered in the translation through the diction of different stylistic coloring – both the high-style, even archaic words as well as the everyday words close to colloquialisms. Following the Old English poet, the translator uses the oral-epic manner of narration, neither reducing it to a limited stylization, nor turning it into an innovative experiment. The translator manages to convey the ability of the Old English poetic language to coin new compounds through creating ‘potential’ words that reveal the ‘open’ character of the Old English synonymic systems. The Russian translation of Beowulf is considered in the context of the history of English translations of the poem as well as studies of Old English and Old Scandinavian literature in Russia.


2018 ◽  
Vol 47 (3) ◽  
pp. 409-434 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lucas M. Seuren ◽  
Mike Huiskes ◽  
Tom Koole

AbstractThis article investigates a specific practice that recipients in Dutch talk-in-interaction use when responding to turns that have as one of their main jobs to inform. By responding to an informing turn with an oh-prefaced nonrepeating response that has yes/no-type interrogative word order, recipients treat that turn as counter to expectation and request both confirmation of the inference formulated in his/her response, as well as reconciliatory information for the two discrepant states of affairs. This practice is compared to similar cases where the nonrepeating response is not oh-prefaced to show that such turns implement different actions. Data are in Dutch with English translations. (Counterexpectations, change-of-state, yes/no-type interrogatives, action formation, practions)*


1980 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 235-250 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. Eaz

It has long been argued that the peculiar syntactic traits which typify the modern Semitic Ethiopian languages can be accounted for by the Cushitic substratum, notably the word order of the sentence and the system of qualification (the qualifier-qualified order of elements). It has been suggested that among these languages Tigre is ‘more Semitic’ since (a) it is much less rigid as regards word order, and (b) ‘it may optionally have either the Semitic pattern or the Cushitic one’. A parallel diachronic statement would be that as regards its syntax Tigre was more successful in resisting Cushitic influence or, for some reason, less exposed to it. Here, to avoid the problem of measuring the syntactic features of Tigre in general Semitic terms, Gə'əaz is usually taken as the mode for a Semitic language. In this respect it follows that descriptively Tigre is more Gə'əz-like than the other modern Semitic Ethiopian languages. In spite of the plausibility of such an explanation, it seems to be a matter of scholarly tradition rather than the result of thorough investigation, i.e. the belief that Tigre is the odd man out among its modern relations by virtue of its syntax is an impression rather than a proven observation.


1969 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-107 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry W. Kirkwood

A study of word order must take account of the different sets of criteria governing the position of elements and the extent to which the one or the other has a bearing on the order of elements in the languages investigated. It must consider whether word order is predetermined by grammatical rule and what measure of freedom is left to the speaker or writer to manipulate word order to conform to the communicative intention. The present study will mainly be concerned with the sentence opening elements and the position of the grammatical subject.


2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (7) ◽  
pp. 552
Author(s):  
Sadaf Khosroshahi ◽  
Ahmad Sedighi

Translation of mystic terms or metaphors is a very important portion of rendering a text from a source language to a target language, because some of mystic terms do not exist in the target language and this point makes the translation harder. This paper aimed at identifying the translation strategies and procedures used by Darbandi and Davis (1984) in The Conference of the Birds of Attar Neishabouri. To achieve the objectives, Attar’s Persian original work (Shafiei Kadkani, 2010) was read carefully to extract mystical terms.  Then, the translated text by Darbandi, and Davis (1984) was carefully read and the corresponding English translations of Persian mystical term were found.  The original mystical terms and their Persian translation were analyzed based on Van Doorslaer’s (2007) map to find out translation strategies and procedures used by the translators on the one hand and indicate the dominant strategy and procedure in the whole work of translation on the other. The result showed that literal translation strategy (72.41%) was the most frequently used strategy and direct transfer procedure (68.96%) was the most frequently used procedure.  This paper may have some implications in literary translation and help translation instructors and translation trainees as well in translation classes.


1998 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 257-284 ◽  
Author(s):  
Giorgio Graffi

Summary This article examines the views about syntax held by Humboldt, on the one hand, and by the founders of historical-comparative grammar (Bopp, Rask, Grimm, Pott, Schleicher), on the other. In general, it is noted that the grammaire générale tradition of 17th and 18th centuries still survives in the work of such scholars, despite of all criticism they seemingly raised against it. For Humboldt, the common core of all languages has its source in the identity of human thought; also his treatment of the verb and especially his reference to a ‘natural’ word order (i.e., SVO) are clearly reminiscent of this tradition. Traces thereof are also found in Bopp’s analysis of Indo-European conjugation, and in some of Rask’s writings. For instance, Rask, just as Humboldt, assumes a ‘natural’ word order and proposes a list of possible syntactic forms which closely remind us of Girard’s membres de phrase. Grimm’s position appears as more innovative, heavily influenced by a Romantic view of language, but some older conceptions sometimes show up in his work, e.g., when he deals with the notion of ‘subject’. Pott does not completely reject general grammar and a logically-based view of language; he only stresses the need of a more empirical approach than that adopted by the 17th and 18th century linguists. This picture radically changed with Steinthai and Schleicher: the former scholar pronounced a ‘divorce’ between grammar and logic, while the latter one argued that syntax does not belong to linguistics proper and rejected any possibility of postulating syntactic distinctions which do not have any direct morphological correlate.


2021 ◽  
pp. 82-89
Author(s):  
Р.Г. ЦОПАНОВА ◽  
Э. ЧАНГИЗИ

Цель данного исследования – определить сходство и различия в образовании атрибутивных словосочетаний в осетинском и персидском языках. Новизна исследования заключается в том, что словосочетания в осетинском языке не исследовались в сравнении с аналогичными синтаксическими единицами в персидском языке.Актуальность исследования обусловлена тем, что сопоставительное изучение особенностей атрибутивных словосочетаний в осетинском и персидском языках даст возможность охарактеризовать общее и различное в этих языках в области синтаксиса словосочетания, что будет способствовать при необходимости лучшему изучению и исследованию этих языков в области синтаксиса, послужит также развитию межкультурной коммуникации осетин и иранцев, с которыми сейчас у осетин намечаются тесные культурные связи. Атрибутивные словосочетания в персидском языке чаще всего образуются на основе изафета, в ряде случаев используются послелог -ра и примыкание. В осетинском языке определение традиционно стоит перед определяемым словом и бывает выражено всеми знаменательными частями речи и связывается с ним падежными формами, существительными с несколькими послелогами, порядком слов. Для осетинского языка не характерна инверсия определения, но она возможна при его обособлении и изменении семантико-структурных и стилистических отношений между определением и определяемым словом. Инверсия определения не была чужда древнеперсидскому языку, а также языку скифов и алан, с которыми у осетин общее происхождение, на что указывает, помимо многих других свидетельств, лингвистическое единство этих языков на разных уровнях языковых структур. The purpose of this study is to determine the similarities and differences in the formation of attributive phrases in the Ossetian and Persian languages. The novelty of the study lies in the fact, that phrases in the Ossetian language have not been studied in comparison with similar syntactic units in the Persian language. The relevance of the research is due to the fact that a comparative study of the features of attributive phrases in the Ossetian and Persian languages will make it possible to characterize the common and different phrases in these languages in the field of syntax, which will contribute, if necessary, to a better study and research of these languages in the field of syntax, will also serve the development of intercultural communication of the Ossetians and the Iranians, with whom the Ossetians are now developing close cultural ties. Attributive phrases in the Persian language are most often formed on the basis of an isafet, in some cases postposition ‘ra’ and adjunctions are used. In the Ossetian language, the definition traditionally stands before the word being defined and is expressed by all significant parts of speech and is associated with it by case forms, nouns with several postpositions, word order. The inversion of the attribute is not typical for the Ossetian language, but it is possible with its isolation and change of semantic-structural and stylistic relations between the attribute and the word it attributes. The inversion of the attribute was not alien to the ancient Persian language, as well as to the language of the Scythians and Alans, with whom the Ossetians have common origin, which is indicated, among many other evidence, by the linguistic unity of these languages at different levels of linguistic structures.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (16) ◽  
pp. 7662
Author(s):  
Yong-Seok Choi ◽  
Yo-Han Park ◽  
Seung Yun ◽  
Sang-Hun Kim ◽  
Kong-Joo Lee

Korean and Japanese have different writing scripts but share the same Subject-Object-Verb (SOV) word order. In this study, we pre-train a language-generation model using a Masked Sequence-to-Sequence pre-training (MASS) method on Korean and Japanese monolingual corpora. When building the pre-trained generation model, we allow the smallest number of shared vocabularies between the two languages. Then, we build an unsupervised Neural Machine Translation (NMT) system between Korean and Japanese based on the pre-trained generation model. Despite the different writing scripts and few shared vocabularies, the unsupervised NMT system performs well compared to other pairs of languages. Our interest is in the common characteristics of both languages that make the unsupervised NMT perform so well. In this study, we propose a new method to analyze cross-attentions between a source and target language to estimate the language differences from the perspective of machine translation. We calculate cross-attention measurements between Korean–Japanese and Korean–English pairs and compare their performances and characteristics. The Korean–Japanese pair has little difference in word order and a morphological system, and thus the unsupervised NMT between Korean and Japanese can be trained well even without parallel sentences and shared vocabularies.


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