This paper focuses on three aspects of the recipe minilect in translation from Swedish to German. These aspects concern illocutionary speech acts, reader address and ellipsis. The study aims to find out how frequently different translation strategies are used when translating illocutions, reader address and ellipses and to determine why these translation strategies were chosen. The analysis is mainly based on theories on minilects by Nordman (1994), on reader address and illocutionary acts by Rathmayr (2009) and on ellipsis by Teleman et al. (1999) This theoretical background facilitates the classification of the occurrences of illocutions, reader address and ellipsis quantitatively. Also, a qualitative analysis of representative examples is carried out in order to investigate the reason behind the chosen translation strategy. The results show the primary use of infinitives in illocutionary speech acts in German cookbooks in contrast to the imperative in Swedish cookbooks as well as the prominent avoidance of direct reader address in German. Moreover, ellipses are as frequent in German as it is in Swedish cookbooks, the study shows.

This study examines the translation of three forms of reader address from English to Swedish in a gardening guidebook – the pronoun you as a second person reference and generic reference, modal verbs, and imperatives. The translation was made by the author of this study. The aim of the study is to investigate how the three forms of reader address is translated. The quantitative analysis shows that the most used form of reader address out of the three investigated are imperatives, while the pronoun you followed closely behind. While modal verbs were used frequently in the ST, the modality was not translated in the TT. The qualitative analysis shows that the pronoun you was translated into second person du, third person generic man or was omitted in the translation in almost equal measure. How the pronoun you was translated in the TT depended on how the translator interpreted the author’s target audience. Only two modal verbs occurred frequently in the ST, and in the TT they were either translated as modal verbs or into present tense. Lastly, the imperative verbs were most commonly translated as imperatives in the TT. About 10% were translated into tensed verbs. Furthermore, half of that was translated to form suggestions.

This study examines explicitness and implicitness in the instructions of eight English baking recipes and their translations into Swedish. The aim is to investigate whether the degree of explicitness changes in the translation. Additionally, the translation of reader address is examined to determine if it leads to an increase or decrease of the recipe explicitness. Illocution and speech act theory provide a theoretical framework for the analysis. In the examination of translated instructions, the study presents five analyzed verb constructions: the imperative, the passive, the modal auxiliary, the finite verb and the adverbial -ing-clause. In the examination of reader address, the study analyzes the translation of the English subject pronoun you. The results show that the translation keeps close to the ST structure and often renders the instructions with the same verb construction. However, there are instances for each analyzed feature where the translation provides more explicit instructions than the ST. Further, the results indicate that the translation of reader address is closely linked to the translation of the instructions; if the ST verb construction is altered in the TT, the ST reader address may either be translated or omitted in the TT. Additionally, the translator needs to interpret whether the address is aimed at a specific reader or a group of readers, as Swedish can translate the English pronoun you into either du, man, ni or det. The translation of the recipes was performed by the author of this paper, a beginner translator, which may have affected the results.

This study analyses the comparative frequency of “direct reader address” in English and Swedish walking guidebook texts. Through a quantitative and qualitative analysis of specific linguistic features that constitute “direct reader address”, the study aims to highlight the importance of considering reader expectation of a text, i.e. the target culture’s text conventions when translating. The linguistic features in focus are those which help to establish a familiar relationship between reader and writer and thus set up an imaginary dialogue. These are: second-person pronouns, first-person inclusive plural pronouns and verbs in the imperative mood. A translation corpus of walking-guidebook extracts (10 English originals, 11 Swedish originals and their English translations) and my own Swedish-to-English translation of such a text were analysed in order to a) determine to what extent “direct reader address” is used in Swedish and English original walking guidebooks; b) determine to what extent “direct reader address” is retained and used in English translations of Swedish walking guidebooks; and c) discuss the implications of this for translators of such texts. The results of the investigation show that although “direct reader address” does appear in both Swedish and English original guidebooks, it is more prevalent in English ones. Imperative verbs are the most common of all the relevant linguistic features. The results also show that the trend is not only to retain in English translations what “direct reader address” existed in Swedish originals but also sometimes to add “direct reader address” for reasons of syntax and idiomatic usage. The implications are that a target culture’s text conventions are consequential when translating a walking guidebook because they relate to reader expectation, in particular in relation to linguistic features of “direct reader address”. To translate well, and where deadlines allow, it is recommended that a translator’s strategy should try to address reader expectation.