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Article published In:
Review of Cognitive Linguistics
Vol. 19:2 (2021) ► pp.517–547

Translating narrative style

How do translation students and professional translators deal with Manner and boundary-crossing?

ORCID logo | Universitat Politècnica de València
ORCID logo | Universidad de Murcia

Within the context of the Thinking-for-translating framework, this paper analyses the translation of boundary-crossing events including Manner from English into German (both satellite-framed languages) and Catalan and Spanish (both verb-framed languages) to investigate whether student translators transfer these specific types of motion event or otherwise omit (or modulate) some information. Three groups of student translators (having respectively German, Catalan and Spanish as their mother tongues) were asked to translate a series of excerpts from English narrative texts into their respective first languages. The resulting data suggest that the way student translators deal with the translation of these events is influenced by their mother tongues and the nature of the event itself (axis, suddenness, type of Figure, type of Path, type of Manner). It is also noted that German students’ translations are much more similar to the published versions than the Catalan and Spanish ones, and that Catalan and Spanish-speaking students tend to omit boundary-crossing.

Keywords: motion events, boundary-crossing, Manner, translation, thinking-for-translating
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical background issues
    • 2.1The Thinking-for-translating hypothesis
    • 2.2The boundary-crossing constraint
  • 3.The experimental study
    • 3.1Research questions and hypotheses
    • 3.2Materials and methods
      • 3.2.1Participants
      • 3.2.2Material and procedure
      • 3.2.3Data coding
    • 3.3Results and discussion
      • 3.3.1Translation of Manner (hypotheses 1a and 1b)
      • 3.3.2Translation of boundary-crossing (hypotheses 2a and 2b)
      • 3.3.3Translation expertise: Student translators’ translations vs. published translations (hypotheses 3a, 3b and 3c)
  • 4.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 11 October 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/rcl.00093.mol
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