Dutch modal particles maar and wel and their English equivalents in different genres

Abstract

Dutch modal particles maar and wel and their English equivalents in different genres* Sofie NiemegeersThis paper presents the results of a study on the use of the Dutch modal particles (MPs) maar and wel and their translation equivalents in a translation corpus containing both Dutch-English (DU-EN) and English-Dutch (EN-DU) texts. Although a number of linguistic studies has dealt with modal particles, an in-depth translation approach is still missing. Our first aim is to detemine frequency of use from the corpus; the results point to some remarkable differences in the behavior of the MPs maar and wel in DU-EN and EN-DU target texts and in fiction versus non-fiction. These results can be evaluated against the background of an established hypothesis of translation behavior, the Unique Items Hypothesis (Tirkkonen-Condit 2004), which is relevant in the context of the translation of Dutch MPs into English. The second aim is to present an in-depth analysis of the translation of the MP wel in a number of contexts in order to determine: 1) whether the English equivalents confirm our intuition regarding the categoryinternal meaning variations of MP wel depending on its context of use (these meaning variations have not been sufficiently dealt with in the literature on wel; and 2) whether there are differences in the use of the English equivalents of MP wel in the DU-EN and EN-DU subcorpora.