Article published In:
TargetVol. 16:1 (2004) ► pp.29–52
Why change the subject?
On changes in subject selection in translation from English into Norwegian
This paper reports on a study of syntactic changes in alternative translations of a short story and a scientific article, each translated by a group of ten professional translators. The subject is kept in approximately nine cases out of ten, with a somewhat higher degree of change in the scientific article. Where changes occur, they can very often be traced to differences between the languages on the lexical or syntactic level, but absolute differences signalled by identical behaviour of a whole translator group are as good as non-existent. After more features have been studied, it may be possible to identify profiles for the individual translators—and the two translator groups—showing to what extent their choices are guided by adequacy in relation to the source text vs. acceptability in relation to the target language.
Keywords: subject selection, translation corpora, variation in translation, adequacy vs. acceptability, English/Norwegian
Article outline
- 1.Aim
- 2.The multiple-translation project
- 3.Research questions
- 4.Characteristics of the subject
- 5.Overview of findings
- 6.What sorts of subjects are replaced?
- 7.Where do the new subjects come from?
- 8.Discussion of changes
- 8.1Changes triggered by lexis
- 8.2Nominalizations in subject position
- 8.3Insertion of dummy det
- 8.4Changes in voice
- 8.5Subject selection and cohesion
- 9. Individual variation
- 10.Concluding remarks
- Notes
-
References
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Abbreviations
Byatt (original), transl. 1–10; Trevarthen (original), transl.1–10. References to the original texts are followed by sentence numbers.
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