earticle

영어

Dual-subject construction―which is found in the language of Korean law―is one of the unique features of the topic-prominent Korean language. The first subject in a dual-subject sentence in Korean source texts is often the sentence topic. This paper presents an examination of dual-subject sentences in the Criminal Act, Administrative Procedure Act, Foreign Investment Promotion Act and Civil Act and considers how the two subjects, N1 and N2, were translated into English. First, we identified 41 dual-subject phrases from 38 sentences in the four Korean statutes and analyzed them according to Yang (1989). Second, we examined how the dual subjects were translated into English based on Chae’s (2010) categorization of translation types of dual subjects. Our analysis indicated that in English translations, either N1 or N2 of the source text served as the subject. When N1 of the Korean source text was translated into a subject in English, N2 of the source text played various roles either as an object, complement, component of a verbal phrase or a prepositional phrase. N2 also worked as an adjective phrase, serving to describe N1, the subject. Conversely, when N2 became a subject in the English translations, N1 tended to be omitted in the translated dual-subject clauses. In this study, we identified seven types of English translations of dual-subject sentences of Korean statutes, including two types that were not found in Chae’s (2010) work. The findings suggest that given the different and diverse roles of N1 and N2, despite their seemingly subject-like features, translators need to determine the semantic relationship of N1 and N2 when translating dual-subject statutes into English.