Free Indirect Discourse in the Translation into Finnish: The Case of D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love

Tarja Rouhiainen

Abstract

Free indirect discourse (FID) is a narrative technique which purports to convey a character’s mental language while maintaining third-person reference and past tense. This paper deals with the problems the use of FID may create for Finnish translators of English literary narratives. A comparative analysis of D.H. Lawrence’s Women in Love and its translation into Finnish shows that the translator’s treatment of the pronouns he/she may shift the viewpoint from the character’s consciousness to the narrator’s discourse. The article concludes with the question of what stylistic norms could explain the translator’s avoidance of the spoken-language simulation typical of the source text.

Table of contents

Finnish translators of English literary narratives are familiar with what might be called the ‘trap’ of the third-person personal pronouns he/she. Namely, in Finnish there is only one third-person singular personal pronoun, hän, which [ p. 110 ]is not marked for gender. Therefore, ambiguities and grammatical oddities often arise if the English pronouns are indeed replaced by hän. The usual solution in these cases is to resort to the strategy of explicitation; i.e. to use more specific forms of reference, such as proper names, proforms like mies (‘the man’), tyttö (‘the girl’), or the demonstrative pronoun tämä (‘this’), to enable the reader to correctly identify the referent. The following example comes from a short story by Ernest Hemingway, “A Very Short Story” (1a), and its Finnish translation by Kalevi Nyytäjä (1b). A back-translation into English, as literal a rendering as possible, is given after the TT version:

Full-text access is restricted to subscribers. Log in to obtain additional credentials. For subscription information see Subscription & Price. Direct PDF access to this article can be purchased through our e-platform.

References

Fiction

Canth, Minna
1994Hanna. Jyväskylä: Gummerus. [Orig. publ. 1886.]Google Scholar
Hemingway, Ernest
1955 “A Very Short Story”. The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway. New York: Scribner’s 1955 139–142. [Orig. publ. 1924 in In Our Time .]Google Scholar
1991 “Hyvin lyhyt kertomus”, tr. Kalevi Nyytäjä. Ensimmäiset 49 kertomusta. Helsinki: Tammi 1991 158–160.Google Scholar
Lawrence, D.H.
1971Women in Love. Harmondsworth: Penguin. [Orig. publ. 1921.]Google Scholar
1980Rakastuneita naisia, tr. Rauno Ekholm. Tampere: Weilin+Göös.Google Scholar
Pakkala, Teuvo
1994Elsa. Jyväskylä: Gummerus. [Orig. publ. 1894.]Google Scholar

Studies

Banfield, Ann
1982Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and Presentation in the Language of Fiction. Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
Barthes, Roland
1982Image—Music—Text, tr. Stephen Heath. Glasgow: Fontana.Google Scholar
Brinton, Laurel
1980 “‘Represented Perception’: A Study in Narrative Style”. Poetics 9:4. 363–381.   DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cohn, Dorrit
1978Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction. Princeton: Princeton University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
[ p. 126 ]
Coulmas, Florian
1986 “Reported Speech: Some General Issues”. Florian Coulmas, ed. Direct and Indirect Speech. Berlin, New York, Amsterdam: Mouton de Gruyter 1986 1–28.   DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ehrlich, Susan
1990Point of View: A Linguistic Analysis of Literary Style. London and New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Genette, Gérard
1980Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, tr. Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Leech, Geoffrey N. and Michael H. Short
1981Style in Fiction: A Linguistic Introduction to English Fictional Prose. London and New York: Longman.Google Scholar
Levenston, E.A. and Gabriela Sonnenschein
1986 “The Translation of Point-of-View in Fictional Narrative”. Juliane House and Shoshana Blum-Kulka, eds. Interlingual and Intercultural Communication: Discourse and Cognition in Translation and Second Language Acquisition Studies. Tübingen: Narr 1986 49–59.Google Scholar
Lodge, David
1990After Bakhtin: Essays on Fiction and Criticism. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Londen, Anne-Marie
1989Litterärt talspråk: studier i Runar Schildts berättarteknik med särskild hänsyn till dialogen. Helsinki: Svenska Litteratursällskapet i Finland.Google Scholar
McHale, Brian
1978 “Free Indirect Discourse: A Survey of Recent Accounts”. PTL 3:2. 249–287.Google Scholar
Scholes, Robert
1982Semiotics and Interpretation. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
Stanzel, Franz K.
1986A Theory of Narrative, tr. Charlotte Goedsche. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Tammi, Pekka
1992Kertova teksti: esseitä narratologiasta. Helsinki: Gaudeamus.Google Scholar
Toury, Gideon
1977Translational Norms and Literary Translation into Hebrew, 1930– 1945. Tel Aviv: The Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics, Tel Aviv University. [Hebrew]Google Scholar
Valle, Ellen
1993 “Narratological and Pragmatic Aspects of the Translation into Finnish of Doris Lessing’s Four-Gated City ”. Yves Gambier and Jorma Tommola, eds. Translation and Knowledge/SSOTT IV. Turku: University of Turku, Centre for Translation and Interpreting 1993 245–261.Google Scholar
Valtanen, Helena
1989Näkökulman kääntämisestä: näkökulman lingvistiset merkit ja niiden kääntäminen Virginia Woolfin romaanissa Majakka. Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä, Department of Literature.Google Scholar