A Parallel Corpus Based Contrastive Study on Negation in Korean and Indonesian Languages

Abstract

The current research aims to uncover the similarities and differences between Korean ‘an (안)’ and ‘-ji anhta (-지 않다)’, and Indonesian ‘tidak’ and ‘belum’, as well as to formulate their characteristics. This research is an applied contrastive study and the data are derived from the Korean-Indonesian parallel corpus made from Korean drama subtitles. Based on the results, the first prominent findings show that ‘an’ and ‘-ji anhta’, and ‘tidak’ and ‘belum’ are equivalent in regards to their usage as negative markers in negative sentences, thus indicating that they correspond to each other. The findings show that among 1,104 data of Korean negative utterances, only 770 data (69.75%) are translated into Indonesian negative utterances, and 334 data (30.25%) are translated into affirmative utterances by applying alternative translation strategies. The second prominent findings reveal that they are non-equivalent due to the shifts that happen, thus showing that they do not correspond to each other. There are three types of shifts causing the non-equivalence, namely (1) shift from negative verbal into negative nominal forms (32 data, 0.90%), (2) shift from negative declarative into negative imperative forms (36 data, 3.26%), and (3) shift from negative into affirmative forms (334 data, 30.25%). In general, the shifts occur in the subtitle translation because Korean and Indonesian languages belong to different categories in terms of language family and have different ways to express negative meanings.