wordy expressions - issue of direct translation II

The other day, my husband and I had sort of an unexpected eureka moment. My husband, who is a native English speaker and also happens to be learning Korean, said something that represented exactly what I am going to explain in this post.

In Korean, people do not usually say "매운 떡볶이에 설탕을 넣어야 한다." More natural sentence would be "떡볶이가 매우면 설탕을 넣어야 한다." Note the difference between the two: the first sentence is one single clause with 넣어야 한다, and the noun 떡볶이 is modified with an adjective 매운, while the second one has two clauses with 매우면 and 넣어야 한다. The first sentence is not necessarily incorrect, but it is something my husband would say, not the majority of Koreans.

In other words, the Korean language tends to add an extra clause, rather than modifying a noun. This is why a lot of my students prefer to add extra clauses, i.e. "명사 that 주어 동사", "명사 with 명사", or "명사 of 명사", rather than modifying a noun with an adjective or using an action verb. This is not necessarily incorrect, but often times those sentences are quite wordy and awkward.

Take a look at the following sentences.

• It takes 10 months to get a license with one year of validity (13 words)
  
• Creating jobs related to clean energy is important to revive the sluggish economy (13 words)
  
• Corporations that have lowered prices have had very few successes in this discriminating market (14 words)
  
• The government signed a treaty with legally binding force to fight global terrorism (13 words)
  
• The school can accept more students without the worsening of its quality of education (14 words)
  
• The United States is going to build a ground-based interceptor missile targeting short-range missiles that are easy to intercept (21 words)
  

You might not have noticed anything awkward in the above sentences. In fact, in terms of grammatical correctness, you are well within your rights to say these. They are not necessarily wrong.

However, in 외무고시 or 행정고시, you do not have 5 pages to present your argument. You only have 200 words max. The key to higher score is brevity, not verbosity. Having said that, modifying a noun or using an action verb can come in very handy, and help you avoid adding unnecessary extra clauses. Take a look at the following and note how the above sentences can be made more succinct.

• It takes 10 months to get a one-year license (10 words: -3 from the original)
  
• Creating clean-energy jobs is important to revive the sluggish economy (11 words: -2)
  
• Few corporations have succeeded by lowering prices in this discriminating market (11 words: -2)
  
• The government signed a legally binding treaty to fight global terrorism (11 words: -2)
  
• The school can accept more students without compromising its quality of education (12 words: -2)
  
• The United States is going to build a ground-based interceptor missile targeting easy-to-intercept short-range missiles (19 words: -2)