Translating Sentence Adverbs in C. S. Lewis’s "The Chronicles of Narnia – The Magician’s Nephew"

Abstract

Sentence adverbs (SAs) take the whole sentence into their scope and express the speaker’s viewpoint, opinion or comment on an action, or some sort of modality assessment on the event. They do not offer any information on how the action occurred and this is what makes them different from manner adverbs. It is interesting to investigate the strategies that two Romanian translators adopt in their renderings of C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia: The Magician’s Nephew, since C. S. Lewis does not shy away from using adverbs in his writings. Retranslation in itself is quite an intriguing phenomenon to analyze, but in this case what makes it even more interesting is the way in which the translators chose to render a grammatical structure which behaves in a very heterogeneous manner.