earticle

영어

This study aims to investigate characteristics found in materials translated from Chinese to Korean, focusing on predicates. Predicates include a large amount of grammatical information such as tense, aspect, honorifics and modality in Korean language as one of the agglutinative languages. On the other hand, Chinese as an isolated language has a limited verbal conjugation, i.e. combinations of grammatical morphemes with a predicate are not common. This means that Chinese learners are likely to produce more errors in the process of learning Korean, especially errors related to the usage of predicates. Therefore, in this paper the characteristics found in translated materials of Aesop's Fables by Chinese Korean language learners have been analysed. The reason for analysing the translated materials was to prevent the learners from using avoidance strategies. Moreover, translated materials exhibit translator's language ability. In advance of presenting the analysis, several contrastive aspects found in predicates were researched for better understanding of the relevant data. The research resulted in displaying the following interlanguage characteristics: MLU-m (Mean Length of Utterance-morpheme) of translated materials by Chinese learners is shorter than that of Korean natives (5.23 vs. 4.56). This fact means that Chinese learners use fewer grammatical morphemes than Korean natives. Specifically, they show difficulties in the usage of tense and aspect. They also have problems in connecting two sentences using connective endings.