earticle

영어

Korean and Japanese, show some resemblance in the types of sentence-final expressions and writing styles. To understand how the two languages actually been used in real sentences, this paper analyzed the texts of official website content from autonomous and government bodies of Korea and Japan. The findings show that the number of online honorifics of Korean autonomous and government bodies is almost the same whereas Japanese autonomous bodies use online honorifics 15% point more than Japanese governments’; the usage frequency of non-honorifics is the lowest on both autonomous and government bodies of Korea as well as Japan; substantive endings are more favored by governments than autonomous bodies in both Korea and Japan. This paper identified the total use of honorifics on autonomous and government bodies of the Japanese websites was higher than that of Korea's. It is partly due to the actual usage of sentence-final expressions of Korean is different from Japanese and partly the tendency of creating content: Japanese websites seem to create more of reader-focused content. It is often considered that a sentence-final expression of the two languages has an exact matching set of each other. However, the findings of this paper tell that, in actual texts, there are some difference in the usage. As various Korean government agencies are translating their online content into Japanese recently, they should pay more attention not only to convey the right meanings but also to select an appropriate sentence-final expression.