Individual variation between translators in the use of clause building and clause reduction

Abstract

Recent years have seen an increasing interest in translators’ voices as manifested in their writing style. The present study is an investigation of differences in the use of clause building and clause reduction, which has not so far been investigated in any depth with regard to individual variation. The findings show that translators have distinct styles both with respect to how closely they follow the source text and in the structures they prefer when they introduce changes. The study also demonstrates the importance of analysing changes in context, as translators may be forced to perform syntactic changes that are in principle optional because they have made certain choices in other places of the text. Finally, the study emphasizes the advantage of corpora comprising multiple translations of the same source text.

On brackets in translation (or how to elaborate in brackets)

“…In view of this, it is not surprising that English translators often build clauses (cf. Dirdal, 2014) from phrases in translations from German. The tendency for clause building is nevertheless strong enough for Swedish translators to also build clauses in translations from German, in spite of their generally more cautious approach to the introduction of changes.…”

“…Previous studies (Dirdal, 2014;Ström Herold and Levin, 2018, forthcoming) have observed that translations tend to use more elaborate structures than originals, meaning that translators tend to go from phrasal to clausal constructions rather than the other way around. Dirdal (2014: 122) uses the term 'clause building' for those changes that move towards independent main clauses, such as phrases rendered as clauses or non-finite clauses rendered as finite clauses.…”

“…The term 'clause reduction' is used to refer to the opposite case. Compared to clause building, clause reduction is usually rare (Dirdal, 2014;Ström Herold and Levin, forthcoming). The tendency towards clause building is also present in our material, but, as will become evident below, only partially.…”

“…The tendency towards clause building is also present in our material, but, as will become evident below, only partially. Contrary to Dirdal (2014), we restricted our study to a binary opposition between clausal instances, which consist of verbs in combination with other elements, and phrasal instances, which do not, and instead typically contain noun phrases or prepositional phrases.…”