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The Expression of Tense, Aspect, Modality and Evidentiality in Albert Camus’s L'Étranger and Its Translations / L'Étranger de Camus et ses traductions : questions de temps, d'aspect, de modalité et d'évidentialité (TAME): An empirical study / Etude empirique
Edited by Eric Corre, Danh Thành Do-Hurinville and Huy Linh Dao
[Lingvisticæ Investigationes Supplementa 35] 2020
► pp. 143–160

Chapter 8
The PC and Imparfait in German and Swedish (re)‍translations of L’Étranger

| Stockholm University
| Lund University

This comparative study investigates the strategies used for translating the French past tenses (passé composé and imparfait) in two Swedish and two German translations of Camus’ L’Étranger. Due to grammatical restrictions of the target languages, it is difficult for a translator to render both the semantics and the stylistic effects connected to these French past tenses. The first translation into Swedish and the first translation into German both conform to target culture norms as they use präterium (German) and preteritum and aspectual verbal markers (Swedish). The retranslations into both languages reproduce, to a much higher degree, the restrained style of the original, either through the alternation between präteritum and perfekt (German) or a less frequent use of verbal markers (Swedish).

Keywords: passé compose , imparfait , retranslation, Swedish, German, aspect, style
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Aspect in the past tenses of French, German, and Swedish
  • 3.The retranslation hypothesis
  • 4.Material: Four translations of L’Étranger
  • 5.The empirical study
    • 5.1Tense
    • 5.2Verbal markers that are relevant to aspect
  • 6.Summary and concluding remarks
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 11 August 2020
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/lis.35.08bla
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