"우리 할머니의 연세가 어떻게 되세요?"
Translation:How old is my grandmother?
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I answered from mobile app. It only had my in the words. Please report yours to feedback. I thought maybe our is a choice, too.
This doesn't make sense. The literal translation is "How is my grandma's age becoming?" I have 2 problems.
- I thought the phrase "how old" was "몆 살", not "어떻게 되세요".
- Even if it could be "어떻게 되세요", how does "how does it become" mean "how old"?
Literally it's something along the lines of "how is our grandma's age becoming". 몇 살이에요/몇 살이야 is a way of saying "how old is..." as well but it's not very respectful. It's what you would say when talking about somebody who is younger than you and not significantly higher on the social ladder either. For older people use 연세가 아떻게 되다 (with whatever verb endings the situation warrants). There is also 나이가 어떻게 되다 (again conjugated of course) which is somewhere in the middle (나이 and 연세 both mean "age", only Sino-Korean 연세(年歲) is a more respectful than native Korean 나이).
Makes sense to me. Literal translations are not 1:1 between Korean and English, but in this case it's close enough to make sense for me.
If you're talking to someone older than you, you can't use 몇 살이에요? You say 연세가 어떻게 되세요. Same thing with name, instead of saying 이름, you use 성함.
I've also heard 어떻게 translated as "what" so perhaps "what is grandma's age becoming?" makes more sense
It says 우리 할머니 in Korean. The rules on when a possessive is used are for the most part pretty much the same in Korean as they are in English, so I would translate the possessive here.
Probably the biggest difference is that Korean tends to use plural possessives for things like family members or groups which the speaker is part of, even if there aren’t actually multiple referents. So people would normally say 우리 회사, 우리 엄마, even if they are a one-person enterprise/an only child. Singular pronouns 내 회사/내 엄마 aren’t wrong, but plural is much more idiomatic.
