Translating the Elusive

Marked word order and subjectivity in English-German translation

Author
ORCID logoMonika S. Schmid | Heinrich-Heine-Universität, Düsseldorf
HardboundAvailable
ISBN 9789027216410 (Eur) | EUR 95.00
ISBN 9781556197956 (USA) | USD 143.00
 
e-Book
ISBN 9789027283993 | EUR 95.00 | USD 143.00
 
Google Play logo
This work presents an in-depth analysis of text- and speaker-based meaning of non-canonical word order in English and ways to preserve this in English-German translation. Among the sentence structures under discussion are subject-verb inversion, Left Dislocation, Topicalization as well as wh-cleft and it -cleft sentences. Various approaches to the description and analysis of the meaning potential of these structures are presented and discussed, among them theories of grammaticalization, subjectivity, empathy and information structure.
English as a rigid word order language has quite different means of creating meaning by syntactic variation than a free word order language like German. Contrastive analyses of English and German have emphasized structural differences due to the fact that English uses word order to encode the assignment of grammatical roles, while in German this is achieved mainly by morphological means. For most ‘marked’ constructions in English a corresponding, structure-preserving translation does not lead to an ungrammatical or unacceptable German sentence. The temptation for the translator to preserve these structures is therefore great. A case study discusses more than 200 example sentences drawn from recent works of US-American fiction and offers possible strategies for their translation.
[Benjamins Translation Library, 36] 1999.  xii, 174 pp.
Publishing status: Available
Table of Contents
“Schmid's analysis of marked word order and its communicative clues provides us with a manageable tool for the comprehension of meanings that tend to escape and this is the main strength of the book, together with its clear structure.”
Cited by

Cited by 5 other publications

Ferreira, Aline, John W. Schwieter & Daniel Gile
2015. The position of psycholinguistic and cognitive science in translation and interpreting. In Psycholinguistic and Cognitive Inquiries into Translation and Interpreting [Benjamins Translation Library, 115],  pp. 3 ff. DOI logo
Fischer, Klaus
2009. Cleft Sentences: Form, Function, and Translation. Journal of Germanic Linguistics 21:2  pp. 167 ff. DOI logo
House, Juliane
2015. Global English, discourse and translation. Target. International Journal of Translation Studies 27:3  pp. 370 ff. DOI logo
JOHANSSON, STIG
2001. The German and Norwegian correspondences to the English construction type thats what. Linguistics 39:3 DOI logo
Odlin, Terence
2005. CROSSLINGUISTIC INFLUENCE AND CONCEPTUAL TRANSFER: WHAT ARE THE CONCEPTS?. Annual Review of Applied Linguistics 25  pp. 3 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 16 march 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Subjects

Translation & Interpreting Studies

Translation Studies

Main BIC Subject

CF: Linguistics

Main BISAC Subject

LAN009000: LANGUAGE ARTS & DISCIPLINES / Linguistics / General
ONIX Metadata
ONIX 2.1
ONIX 3.0
U.S. Library of Congress Control Number:  99056683 | Marc record