Using the ENPC and the ESPC as a Parallel Translation Corpus: Adverbs of Frequency and Usuality1

Abstract

The topic for the present study is intended to represent a common denominator between my own research and Karin Aijmer’s. The EnglishNorwegian Parallel Corpus (ENPC) and the English-Swedish Parallel Corpus (ESPC) are sister corpora with common objectives, design criteria, and structures; cf. Aijmer et al (1996:79 f). Especially their fiction parts also share a good number of texts. One advantage of this is that it is possible not only to compare English to Norwegian and Swedish respectively, but also to compare different translations of the English originals with each other. Adverbs of frequency and usuality were chosen as a test case for the feasibility of using the ENPC and the ESPC as a parallel translation corpus, i.e. one which contains alternative translations of the same text. This was partly because I have worked with time adverbials previously (e.g. Hasselgard 1996) and partly because usuality can be viewed as a category of modality (Halliday & Matthiessen 2004:147), a topic closely associated with the research of Karin Aijmer. The questions discussed in the present paper are the following: how are adverbs of frequency and usuality translated into Norwegian and Swedish? To what extent can the translations from English in the ENPC and the ESPC be seen as parallel/alternative translations? Are Norwegian and Swedish similar enough to be regarded as alternative translations? In other words: to what extent are the same options available in both languages? And finally, assuming that usuality is a modal category – how