Abstract

This study evaluates translations of a Korean short story to determine how pro-drop pronouns are translated into other languages, whether they are translated into null subject pronouns as in Korean. Eight researchers identified instances of pro-drop from a Korean short story titled Plaza Hotel and identified the distribution of overt and null subject pronouns in five target languages including English, German, Russian, Spanish and Japanese. The sentences were divided into dialogues and declarative sentences and subjects were classified into different types of pronouns for further analysis. The study demonstrated that null subjects were translated into overt pronouns in English (76.0%), German (64.3%), Russian (56.1%), Spanish (1.4%) and Japanese (0.5%). The percentage of overt pronouns in Spanish and Japanese were considerably low compared to other languages, which indicates that these two languages share a particular characteristic. The study also illustrated that the distribution of overt pronouns were higher in declarative sentences than dialogues and the gap was particularly pronounced in English (14.5 percentage point) and Russian (28.2 percentage point), and less so for German (3.0 percentage point). Moreover, the occurrence of null subjects being translated into first person subject pronouns were higher than third person subject pronouns

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