I'm glad Korean is my native language.
Let me ask you a question first: What day is October 9th? Yes, that's right. It's Hangeul Day.
It's a day to celebrate how scholars, starting with King Sejong the Great about 500 years ago, came together to create Hunminjeong-um, today's Hangul, and spread it out to the world. Hangul is one of the few characters used by humankind where the creator and year of creation are clearly identified. In addition, Hangul is highly regarded worldwide for being characters that match pronunciation and letters, characters created scientifically by knowing where and how to make sounds when pronouncing, characters composed of simple combinations of symbols, and characters that match pronunciation. Of course, Hangul and Korean are different. The Korean language existed even before the birth of Hangul. (I'll cover this later.) On the occasion of Hangeul Day, let's take a look at why translating using Korean is less easy than other foreign languages.
Isolated refractive words
There may be many reasons why Korean translation is difficult, but I'm going to look at one of the most representative reasons.
It's just per language Korean translation is difficult due to differences in linguistic classificationThis is it.
Do you remember the isolated words, crosswords, and inflexible words you learned as an advanced course in Korean language class when you were in school? It's a term that often appears in college liberal arts classes. Let me first briefly explain each term.
Isolated words are languages where there is no change in the form of sentences, and grammatical relationships are mainly expressed by word orderIt refers to Each word doesn't represent a grammatical change. A typical language for isolated languages is Chinese. For example, “I love her”, “She loves me.” Let me explain it by comparing it with English. In English I love her. (I love her), She loves me. (She loves me) The form of the verb changes and the class () of the word changes according to each subject/object. However, Chinese, which is an isolated language, is characterized by words such as I love her (I love her) and she loves me (she loves me). Thai and Vietnamese are also isolated languages. Of course, depending on the point of view, English can be both an isolated language and an inflexible language. This is true in that it can become both a noun and an adjective depending on the position of the same word. Anyway, an isolated language is a language whose usage is determined by word order.
Refractive language is a language that shows the various relationships words have in a sentence due to changes in phonetics and endingsIt refers to. There are grammatical categories such as surname (gender), number (number), tense (tense), and personal name (personal name), etc., and they change accordingly. Most European languages, Russian, etc., fall into this category. The word order is free, but you should remember rules such as changing mother and changing first name.
Confusion is sensitive to speechI will. Different parts are attached to one word. The role of words in a sentence is determined by the investigation attached to the end. Korean and Japanese are typical confusions. I love her. I love her. I love her. It is because of the characteristics of confounding words that it is understandable and makes sense even when the word order is changed. Of course, since languages change, there are often exceptional situations that destroy even such linguistic classifications, but as a major category, machine translation and human translation face difficulties due to differences in linguistic classifications.
Other characteristics unique to Korean make Korean translation difficult. Honorifics, or honorific expressions, and the large number of words compared to English (based on the words listed in the dictionary) can also make translation difficult. The success or failure of communication is determined by whether formal expressions are used according to the situation, object, and context, and whether or not you are an elderly person. The translation may vary depending on the relative elevation method. It is important to be aware that applying various verb conjugations, such as hyphenation, conjugation, and deconstruction, to a foreign language may increase confusion when translating.
(I'm very lucky that Korean is my native language. 🤣)
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The reason why the natural language processing (NLP) process in Korean is particularly difficult, says Baek Seon-ho, the head of Twigfarm, which provides translation services for Gicon Studio, and CEO Baek Seon-ho, a natural language processing expert, seems to be in a similar context.
“Korean is a creative language. The word order of the subject and object verbs can be changed to various situations, and specific words can be omitted or abbreviated to give a new feeling even to sentences with the same content. This diversity makes it difficult for machines that like rules and patterns to understand. Korean also has various morphological variations of verbs. In the case of English, there are only transliterations based on tense and personal name, but in Korean, the endings of verbs change in various ways depending on the situation depending on the speaker and listener, such as exaltation. Since research on machine translators is centered around Western languages such as English, it is difficult to apply creative Korean to traditional methods.” -Baek Seon-ho, CEO of Twig Farm
See you in the next post~
*This content has been transferred from Gicon Studio to Letterworks.
