Contrastive Analysis of Cohesion Shifts in English-Korean Translation

Abstract

Translation could be defined as textual process. The text of a language community has distinct features which differentiates it from non-text. These distinct features are called standards of textuality and when these standards are violated, the text sounds unnatural and foreign. Cohesion is one of the standards of textuality and it is mainly concerned with mutual connectivity of the words in the surface structure of a text. Since each language community has its own set of cohesive devices and preferred cohesion patterns, shifts in cohesive devices between the source and the target might occur and give rise to cohesion pattern changes. The objective of this study is to compare and analyze the differences of cohesive devices and cohesion patterns between a set of English source and Korean target texts and an attempt is made to arrive at some generalizations. The cohesion pattern changes in the target could be categorized into two types: language-oriented cohesion shifts and translation-oriented cohesion shifts. Language-oriented cohesion shifts are those motivated by the differences in the cohesion mechanism between the two languages. Translation-oriented cohesion shifts are usually motivated by the translator's effort to mediate the differences between the source and target such as those of mutual knowledge and text type norms. In addition, it also includes shifts caused by the translation process that results in such tendencies as explicitation, over compensation, and the translators failure to identify specific cohesion devices of the source. Identification of language-oriented cohesion shifts presupposes the identification of intrinsic cohesion differences between Korean and English. This is undertaken by analyzing a set of originally written in Korean parallel texts.