earticle

영어

The four-character structure, a broader concept than the four-character idiom, refers to an expression composed of four letters. This form, housing rich and diverse meanings beyond the intrinsic meaning of the letters, poses significant interpretative challenges. While studies on these four-character structures (primarily four-character idioms) have primarily been confined to paper text data, this paper extends the analysis to video media, exploring a previously unexamined aspect of four-character structure translation in such a medium. Audiovisual translation, more constrained in time and space than conventional paper text translation, represents a unique realm where the source language and target language are concurrently displayed. It is a sound-to-text translation rather than a text-to-text translation. Omission, a prevalent strategy in audiovisual translation, is conspicuously applied in the translation of four characters. This approach can be attributed to the fact that detailed action descriptions are often compensated for by on-screen motion or facial expressions, and by the context provided before and after the idiom, due to the nature of video media. However, issues arise with predicate omission; excessive omissions and paraphrasing occasionally result in failure to adequately preserve character integrity. Besides the omission strategy, other noticeable strategies include substitution and grammatical conversion, in alignment with the linguistic habits of the target language. In the future, analysis of further data concerning how the four-character structure is translated in video media will likely yield valuable insights not only for translation but also for interpretation, a field inherently constrained by time and space.