The gerund challenge

Abstract

Abstract A cursory overview of how the ‑ing forms of a small sample of verbs (see, take, do) are translated in various types of European documents as presented on Linguee (http://www.linguee.com/) indicates a surprising variety of possible equivalents in Romanian: infinitive and nominalized infinitive, conjunctive (preceded by marker să), verbs in the various tenses of the indicative, nominal groups, gerunziu ‑ind/ ‑ând forms etc. Translators often have to compensate for the fact that both English participles and gerunds are potentially ambiguous without complements. Translating any ‑ing forms often involves obligatory or optional grammatical transformations. The present paper proposes the creation of a (preliminary) inventory of interlinguistic correspondences of gerund forms and their equivalents in Romanian based on real corpus (reports of the parliamentary committees) to point out the various translational options, evaluate them quantitatively (the most/least frequently used solutions) and to reveal potential difficulties arising from such an array of options.