Articles and Stories

July 14, 2016

The logic in answering a negative yes/no question is reversed between English and Korean.
While our Korean team will always be on the lookout to double-check such instances, a client can also help in advance by writing the source text without such negative yes/no questions.
Let me start with a question….
You didn’t stop and look at this blog when you read the first paragraph a moment ago, did you?
If you did, then in English you’d say “Yes, I did,” and if you didn’t, you’d say “No, I didn’t.”
But that’s not how a Korean would reply.
A Korean would say, “No, I did,” or “Yes, I didn’t.”
Confused? This difference happens because I asked a negative question.
When we reply in English, we ignore the fact that the question was negative and pretend it was positive. But in Korean, the answer strictly follows the logic of the question. If I asked you if you didn’t look at this blog and you, in fact, didn’t look at it, then, yes, you didn’t look at it. Right?
Is my explanation clear?
In translation, this little twist means that “yes/no” responses to negative English questions are translated to “no/yes” answers in Korean (or vice-versa), and a translator must be careful to get this right. In fact, regardless of the translation direction, either from English into Korean or from Korean into English, sometimes the simplest solution is to just rewrite the question in the target language to get rid of the ambiguous negative construct.
Koreans ask negative Korean questions ALL THE TIME and this frequently confuses non-Koreans.