A Corpus-based Translation of Korean Financial Reports into English

Dong-Young Lee¹^,^†

¹Sejong University

^†Corresponding Author : Dong-Young Lee, Department of English Language and Literature, Sejong University, 98 Gunja-dong, Gwangjin-gu, Seoul 143-747, Korea. Phone: +82-(0)2-3408-3636; Email: dylee@sejong.ac.kr

Copyright ⓒ 2016, Sejong University Language Research Institue. This is an Open-Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Received: Jan , 2011; Revised: Jan , 2011; Accepted: Mar , 2011

Published Online: Jan 01, 2017

Abstract

This paper shows how to appropriately translate into English the technological words and phrases used in the domain of Korean financial reports together with the linguistic constructions such as the construction referring to a financial expert and the construction expressing a reason for a particular financial situation. These linguistic units occur frequently and typically in both Korean financial reports and English ones. The paper adopts a method of translating the expressions occurring in Korean financial reports into English by consulting their nearest counterparts that are really used in English financial reports on the basis of the constructed corpus of Korean financial reports and that of English ones. This translation method makes it possible to obtain an English translated text that does not have translationese since the text contains expressions that are already used in the target text of financial reports. The method also enables us to easily construct a parallel corpus that displays a source Korean text in parallel with its translated English text in the domain of financial reports. The parallel corpus can be used in designing a statistical machine translation system that translates financial reports bidirectionally between the two languages. Therefore, the corpus-based method of translating financial reports has the advantage of getting a translationese-free result and can be helpful to statistical machine translation.

Keywords: corpus-based translation; financial reports; technological words and phrases; verbs conveying financial situations; linguistic constructions

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