First-Person Pronominal Reference in German and Thai

Abstract

This article is a contrastive study on first-person pronominal reference in German and Thai reflected in the translation process. Based on bidirectional parallel corpora consisting of 12 German and 12 Thai short stories and their translation into the other language, the analysis aims to compare the differences in the pronominal systems of these two languages concentrating on the pronominal reference of the first person. While there is a limited number of ich (l) forms in German, (e.g. mich in accusative,mir in dative) the variation in the use of personal pronouns is much larger in the Thai language. There are different types of Thai equivalents to the German first-person pronoun, (e.g. different forms of first person pronouns), kinship terms, role designation words, zero pronouns, etc. In the corpora analyzed, 16 different forms of Thai equivalents to the German first person pronouns are found. This corpus-based analysis enable translators to be more accurate when translating first-person pronominal references.