Hedges, or hedging devices, are strategies that the writer or speaker can use in order to convey probability, impreciseness or vagueness. Hedges can appear in most parts of speech, for example as adjectives, adverbs or modal or lexical verbs. This study investigates the translation of hedging devices in a non-fiction text from English to Swedish. It also discusses the translation strategies used when rendering the hedging devices in the target language. The primary source of this study was a non-fictional academic text on American architectural history. The method consisted of identifying and categorizing the hedging devices of the source text and then identifying the manner in which they were translated. In the quantitative analysis, it was found that the most frequently used translation strategy was retention, i.e. literal translation, but modification and omission were also found. It was also determined that the target text used a slightly higher number of hedging devices, which could suggest a cross-cultural difference between the languages. The qualitative analysis, supported by corpora and parallel texts, found that modification occurred due to cross-cultural differences or translator preferences. Omission mainly occurred when multiple hedging devices appeared in the same sentence and the function of the omitted hedge could be inferred by the surrounding hedges.

This paper examines the translation of hedging devices from English to Swedish in a non-fiction history book, and more specifically, which strategies are used in the translation process and why. To get a clear overview of the different hedging devices that are found in the ST, they are divided into categories, which are then analyzed individually with illustrative examples. The analysis shows that the most frequent hedging categories in the ST, as well as the reference material from the pilot study, are modal verbs, adverbs and adverbials, and quantifying pronouns, and the most frequently used translation strategy is retention. Furthermore, the study indicates that polysemous hedges can sometimes cause problems for the translator. Other factors that affect translation are genre-specific hedging conventions and translator preferences. As previous research in this subject area seems sparse, this paper aims to begin to fill that gap, but also to encourage larger studies that can, even more clearly, determine hedging conventions in the field of history.