earticle

영어

Since the late 20th century, corpus-based studies have become a general method of investigation in modern linguistics. A corpus (monolingual or multilingual corpus) permits the linguists to explore the real linguistic data used by a speech community. However most of the studies focus on the high-frequency words in a corpus, whereas the low-frequency words are excluded from the subject of the analysis.
The low-frequency words also consist of a corpus; therefore they are important linguistic elements as much as the high-frequency words.
The purpose of this paper is to look into translation equivalences between the low-frequency words in a parallel corpus, a French Novel Moderato Cantabile, and two Korean translations, the Moderato Corpus. For the purpose of researching the translation phenomenon of low-frequency words in the Moderato Corpus, this paper uses the quantitative methods of lexical frequency, co-occurrence and contextual exploration. The result of these analyses demonstrates that the low-frequency nouns have different translational situations as much as the high-frequency ones. Surprisingly, they have also a definitive equivalence between the French word and the Korean word. Therefore, this study contends that low-frequency words can contribute to translation studies and, especially, enhance the automatic translation machine as a translation reference.