Article published in:
Languages in Contrast
Vol. 17:2 (2017) ► pp. 157–182

Question tags in translation

An investigation into the translatability of English question tags into Dutch

| KU Leuven
Canonical question tags feature prominently in spoken English, where they display great versatility. At face value they are meant to elicit a response from a co-participant in the form of (dis)agreement with the proposition to which the tag has been added. Their pragmatic scope is, however, considerably broader: they serve as politeness strategies but also emphasize the speaker’s convictions or mark accusations. Like many other languages, Dutch does not have a similar structure, which raises questions as to what devices Dutch employs to serve the same purpose as question tags. This contrastive study examines such correspondents in a parallel corpus of English novels and their Dutch translations. Three structures can be identified: pragmatic markers, clause-final parentheticals and combinations of these. The data indicate a preference for pragmatic markers (most notably hè and toch), which predominantly appear either as invariant tags or clause-medially, indicating subtle shifts in utterance interpretation.
Keywords: question tags, pragmatics, translation, fiction, English/Dutch, parallel corpus
Published online: 19 September 2017
https://doi.org/10.1075/lic.17.2.01buy
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