The gerund challenge
English gerund forms and their Romanian equivalents in the translation of EU documents
A cursory overview of how the ‑ing forms of a small sample of verbs (see, take, do) are translated in various
types of European documents as presented on Linguee (
http://www.linguee.com/)
indicates a surprising variety of possible equivalents in Romanian: infinitive and nominalized infinitive, conjunctive (preceded
by marker
să), verbs in the various tenses of the indicative, nominal groups, gerunziu ‑ind/ ‑ând forms etc.
Translators often have to compensate for the fact that both English participles and gerunds are potentially
ambiguous without complements. Translating any ‑ing forms often involves obligatory or optional grammatical transformations. The
present paper proposes the creation of a (preliminary) inventory of interlinguistic correspondences of gerund forms and their
equivalents in Romanian based on real corpus (reports of the parliamentary committees) to point out the various translational
options, evaluate them quantitatively (the most/least frequently used solutions) and to reveal potential difficulties arising from
such an array of options.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Corpus
- 3.Results and discussion
- 4.Conclusions for translators
- Notes
-
References