Languages in Contrast - Volume 2, Issue 1, 1999

Using real translation data, this paper examines the facts and reasons underlying the various translations of English it-clefts into German.Corpora of translated English-German texts reveal that only about a third of English it-clefts (or less, depending on text type) are translated with the German equivalent, a Spaltsatz. This may in part be due to differences in the restrictions the two languages place on the focused XP with regard to both grammatical function and category.Against this background we look at the different structures that German uses to render the English it-cleft. It is notable that even where the German Spaltsatz is a grammatically possible translation, other structures are frequently employed instead. This shows that factors such as the discoursefunction (s) of cleft sentences also play a decisive role in selecting stylistically well-formed translations.After a thorough study and analysis of a small sample of translated it-clefts (English-German) in their contexts, we propose the following hypothesis: The main discourse function of English it-clefts — the focusing of an XP element — may not only be translated into German with a Spaltsatz, but can also be presented adequately by introducing specific word orders, focusing particles, or both. In this way, the often cumbersome German cleft construction is dropped in favor of mono clausal sentences.

The discourse markers but and although are similar but not identical in meaning. We investigate the relationship between them using data from the INTERSECT translation corpus. A collection of cases are examined where although corresponds to French mais. In order to explain the correspondences we draw on Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST). By organising RST relations in a hierarchy, and adding a new relation to the inventory of RST relations, we can give a systematic explanation of the relationship between contrast and concession.

Non-referential there has been widely discussed as part of existential sentences, and as an organiser of information in the sentence. Much less attention has been paid to its roles in discourse. As an item without a direct equivalent in many languages, it offers an interesting issue for contrastive analysis: how are its various roles handled in translation? This paper explores uses of thematic there on the basis of a parallel corpus with two-way translations between English and Finnish, focusing on two questions: how translators deal with the information structure of there constructions, and what discourse functions thematic non-referential there is used for. Overall, translators tended to maintain the original information structure, particularly its main focus, without translating word by word, and showing sensitivity to the text level. Pre-topical orienting themes played an adaptive role in focus maintenance. In discourse, there constructions play an important role in organising information: they prospect and introduce new items, new points, topics, and conclusions. In contrast, Finnish appears to use more orienting themes, new topical themes and verb-initial clauses signalling a change of tack in discourse. The findings throw into sharp relief sentences without topic or theme, and question the universality of both phenomena.

In spite of the fact that Swedish gå and English go are historically rather closely related in a transparent way, both verbs are translated by their etymological counterpart only in around one third of the cases, as evidenced from the English-Swedish Parallel Corpus. The article compares the patterns of polysemy formed by the major senses of the two cognates in each language against the background of some typological studies

This paper examines the results from two corpus-based contrastive studies. Both studies offer cross-linguistic claims about the language pair English-Portuguese. We attempt to replicate the studies and check the findings against a different corpus, viz. the English—Portuguese part of the English—Norwegian Parallel Corpus, to see whether the regularities observed in the original corpora can be confirmed. After a brief presentation of each study, we describe how we gathered equivalent data, present our findings in the new corpus, and discuss some possible reasons for discrepancies in relation to the earlier studies. The topics investigated are boundary-crossing movement descriptions (after Slobin 1997) and perception verbs (after Santos 1998).

In this paper it is shown that parallel concordancing represents an efficient means of explicating the grammaticalization level of linguistic forms. One progressive form in Norwegian and the progressive in Spanish are found to be translationally equivalent in some contexts but not in others. In addition, the degree of overlap of the two constructions is seen to vary with the direction of the translation, i.e. the Norwegian progressive is more often translated by a Spanish progressive than vice versa. These results correspond neatly to the part of grammaticalization theory which emphasizes the relation between the general meaning of a form, the widening of distribution and the increase in frequency.; The general meaning of the Spanish progressive gives it a wider distribution and a higher frequency than the Norwegian progressive. Corresponding results are also found in a test case comparing the Norwegian and the English progressives. Parallel concordancing thus strengthens the claim based on monolingual studies that this Norwegian progressive is partially but not totally grammaticalized. The parallel concordancing method has the additional advantage that the contexts determining when the forms are translationally equivalent can be read off directly from the concordances.