SEMANTIC HOMONYMY OF HANJA-BASED COMPOUNDS IN CONTEMPORARY KOREAN TRANSLATION STRATEGIES
Abstract
The contemporary Korean language exists in a state of unique orthographic tension: while Hangeul provides phonetic efficiency, the widespread suppression of the logographic Hanja script. which constitutes the etymological substrate for approximately 70% of the lexicon has precipitated a phenomenon of «semantic erosion». This study undertakes a comprehensive historical and sociolinguistic analysis of semantic homonymy within Sino-Korean compounds, arguing that the transition to exclusive Hangeul usage has effectively stripped the vocabulary of its primary visual disambiguating layer. By tracing the historical phonetic convergence of Middle Chinese tonal distinctions into a limited inventory of Korean syllable structures, the research demonstrates how this orthographic shift necessitates a heavy reliance on high-context inference, a luxury often absent in modern digital, advertising, and media discourses. Methodologically, the article proposes a nuanced typology of homonyms ranging from absolute lexical identity to functional and contextual ambiguities and evaluates their disruptive impact on translation into non-logographic languages, specifically within the Korean-Ukrainian language pair. Empirical analysis of media corpora and Neural Machine Translation (NMT) outputs reveals a critical vulnerability: decontextualized homonyms generate error rates of 15-25% in AI-mediated translation, as algorithms frequently default to statistical frequency rather than semantic propriety. Consequently, the study posits that effective interlingual mediation requires a deliberate cognitive process of «logographic reconstruction». We systematize six compensatory strategies including contextual explication, hybrid glossing, and pre-translation Hanja restoration to mitigate the loss of semantic transparency. Ultimately, the findings suggest that despite the sociopolitical democratization of literacy through Hangeul, the «ghost» of Hanja remains an active, indispensable cognitive factor, demanding that translators possess not merely linguistic fluency, but the philological competence to retrieve the submerged logographic roots of the Korean lexicon.
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