“Buoyantly, nippily, testily” – Remarks on translating manner adverbs into Romanian

Abstract

AbstractAdverbs are a very heterogeneous class that raise a lot of problems not only for their syntactic and semantic interpretation but also for their translation. The current analysis draws on previous formal work on manner adverbs as a very heterogeneous class that exhibits different interpretations with respect to their context of occurrence and their position in the clause. Our current discussion of manner adverbs aims at investigating the different strategies employed by the Romanian translator in rendering the variety of manner adverbs occurring in the translation of P.G. Wodehouse’s “Right ho, Jeeves.” Because English is an adverbial language while Romanian appears to be partly adverbial, it will be interesting to see how the Romanian translator fares in the endeavour of translating manner adverbs and if the predictions made in formal studies on manner adverbs are borne out by the data provided by translation.