Processing possessives in translation between unequal systems. An exploratory study

Abstract

The present paper reports on results of two translation experiments conducted with eye tracking and keylogging. Norwegian and Danish professional and student translators have each translated a small English news text into their L1. The texts include possessives in different syntactic environments which affect choice between a reflexive and an irreflexive form in the targets. While native speakers are expected to make uniform choices which conform to regularities on local and non-local binding principles in Danish and Norwegian, we find disparate solutions among the participants in both groups. The study compares final products with process data, both in terms of edits and in terms of temporal measures indicative of translation effort. Results show a considerable amount of hesitation on choice in all non-finite clause constructions, although more so among students than among professionals. Questions of translation effects versus an unstable locality principle is taken up in the final discussion.

An L2 perspective on possessives: Contrasts and their possible consequences

“…Our paper presents the cross-linguistic background and the basic objectives of L2-oriented research on adnominal possessives that may shed new light on this issue. Some preliminary empirical results are presented by Pitz et al (2017), Helland (2017) and Behrens (2017). 2 From a cognitive point of view, possessives seem more complicated than ordinary pronouns due to the fact that they are not only anaphoric (third person alone) or deictic but at the same time relational expressions: An anaphoric adnominal third person possessive like an ordinary anaphoric pronoun demands an antecedent DP; as a determiner or modifier (see section [3.1]) within a DP, it anchors the referent of its host DP to the referent of the antecedent DP by a relation of possession in a more or less broad sense (see references above), where the antecedent DP denotes the 'owner' (the possessor) and the host DP the 'owned' entity (the possessum).…”