earticle

영어

This paper attempts to examine the potential differences in grammatical cohesion shifts caused by the number of lexical units in antecedents between a set of English source texts and their Korean translations and to explore the nature of motivations behind these shifts. Two types of shift are expected to occur: language-oriented cohesion shifts, motivated by systemic differences between the two languages, and translation-oriented cohesion shifts, caused by the translation process. Identification of language-oriented cohesion shifts presupposes the recognition of intrinsic cohesion differences between Korean and English. To do this, a set of Korean comparable texts are analysed. The analysis reveals that the number of lexical units in antecedents influences the cohesion pattern in each type of text. The English source texts use far more percentage of the grammatical cohesive devices than the Korean comparable texts if the antecedent is a single lexical unit. The English source and the Korean comparable texts use about the same percentage of grammatical cohesive devices if the antecedent is more than one lexical unit. In Korean target texts, the percentage of grammatical cohesive devices falls about the half from the source texts regardless of the number of lexical units in antecedents. This is probably because the translators attempt to mediate the cohesion pattern differences between the English source and the Korean target but still under the influence of interference from the source texts on the one hand; and probably because the translators are not aware of the cohesion pattern differences caused by the number of lexical units in antecedents on the other.