Syntactical Shifts in Translation of Texts on the Country’s History and Culture

Dalia Venckienė

doi:10.5755/j01.sal.0.27.13740

Abstract

Translation of texts on the country’s history and culture has been and remains in demand in Lithuania. In order to convey the message of such texts effectively, the translator has to take into consideration their function, to be familiar with their structure and style, and to be aware of differences between the source and target languages, which are reflected by translation transformations (shifts). The article focuses on syntactical transformations in English translations of Lithuanian texts on the country’s history and culture. Earlier and more recent theoretical approaches to translation shifts and linguistic analysis are discussed, such as the attitudes of Vinay and Darbelnet, Catford, van Leuven-Zwart, Armalytė and Pažūsis, Toury, Chesterman, Molina and Hurtado Albir, Cyrus, Gudavicius, Palumbo, and Leonavicienė. Syntactical patterns emerging in the analysed corpus are discussed, and the dominant trends are reflected. The discussion of shifts is important for translation pedagogy as it helps to obtain answers to practical questions about translation. The findings of the analysis might be interesting from the standpoint of ethnolinguistics. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.sal.0.27.13740

Highlights

The aim of the paper is to study syntactical shifts in translation of Lithuanian texts on the country’s history and culture into English
Lea Cyrus states that the attitudes to shifts have changed “from mildly prescriptive to neutrally descriptive” (2009, p.87). She notices that “in recent years, one can observe a renaissance of linguistic approaches, certainly encouraged by Baker’s (1995) influential suggestions as to how linguistic corpora could be applied to the study of translation” (2009, pp.97-98)
According to Munday (1998), the computerised approach enables researchers to see beyond individual shifts and check if they become trends over the whole texts; computational analysis reduces “the arduousness of manual investigations” and increases the objectivity of results (Cyrus, 2009, pp.98-99)

Summary

Introduction

The aim of the paper is to study syntactical shifts in translation of Lithuanian texts on the country’s history and culture into English. Lea Cyrus states that the attitudes to shifts have changed “from mildly prescriptive to neutrally descriptive” (2009, p.87). She notices that “in recent years, one can observe a renaissance of linguistic approaches, certainly encouraged by Baker’s (1995) influential suggestions as to how linguistic corpora could be applied to the study of translation” (2009, pp.[97-98]). According to Munday (1998), the computerised approach enables researchers to see beyond individual shifts and check if they become trends over the whole texts; computational analysis reduces “the arduousness of manual investigations” and increases the objectivity of results (Cyrus, 2009, pp.[98-99]). Cyrus notices the revival of interest in the concept of translation shifts in the computer era and concludes by saying that “maybe it is time to give up regarding linguistic approaches with suspicion” (2009, pp.[103-104])

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