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The purpose of this study is to discuss how animacy affects English-Korean translations. 52 inanimate subject sentences and 52 animate subject sentences are selected from Reader’s Digest (English-Korean Version) Vol. 80-85. Our analysis shows the followings: i) 96.2% of the English animate subjects are kept as subject in their Korean translations, while only 55.8% of inanimate subjects are translated as subject. ii) Inanimate subjects such as nature (e.g. cloud), machine (e.g. helicopter), social organization (e.g. college) remains as subject in Korean translations. iii) Human participants occurring in syntactic slots other than subject are chosen as new subjects in Korean translations, while inanimate subjects are demoted to adverbial or prenominal phrase. iv) Less prototypical transitive clauses tend to be translated as transitive clauses with the same inanimate subjects, while more prototypical transitive clauses tend to be translated as intransitive clauses with new subjects.