earticle

영어

This paper tests two translation universal hypotheses, simplification and explication on the basis of a Korean-Chinese newspaper editorial translation corpus and a comparable native Chinese newspaper editorial corpus. The lexical density (the proportion of lexical words) and the lexical-function word ratio are calculated to verify simplification hypothesis. Also, the function-total word ratio and the frequencies of conjunctions are examined to verify explication hypothesis. The analysis shows that the lexical density and the lexical-function word ratio in Korean-Chinese translation are significantly lower than in native Chinese. A significantly greater ratio of function over total words and the tendency to use conjunctions more frequently are found in Korean-Chinese translation than in native Chinese. These findings provide evidence in favor of the simplification and explication hypotheses.