The present study addresses, in a comparative Swedish-French perspective, the derived adverb and its modification by a following adjective. From a translational point of view, the structure derived adverb + adjective is interesting, since its translation into French is reputed to generate problems. In this study, a linguistic approach is adopted to these translation problems. For the investigation, a corpus of 510 Swedish tokens representing the structure derived adverb + adjective, and their respective translations into French, was compiled. The tokens originate from 22 contemporary Swedish novels. The number of translators represented in the corpus amount to 14. The tokens were classified into two major groups: intensifying adverb + adjective and qualitative adverb + adjective. The former group was further divided into subcategories according to the semantic nature of the adjective from which the adverb is derived. The main objectives of the study are (1) to investigate the solutions adopted by the translators when rendering the construction derived adverb + adjective in French, (2) to analyse the factors − those inherent to the language and those situated on the contextual level − involved in the cases where the original structure is not maintained in the French translations, (3) to show that the solutions adopted by the translators differ according to which semantic category the adverb belongs to − the intensifying group or the qualitative group. Furthermore, the difficulties of making a clear division between intensifying adverbs and qualitative adverbs placed before the adjective are discussed at some length. The results show that when the adverbial element is intensifying, the same structure is more often maintained in the French translations than in those cases where the adjective is modified by a qualitative adverb. The study also demonstrates the great variety of factors involved in the cases where the structure derived adverb + adjective is not maintained in the French translations. These cases may be due to the fact that the equivalent of the Swedish phrase in question would form a non-established unit in French, to the lack of an equivalent adverb in French, to the tendency of the French language to favour nominal constructions, or to individual preferences of the translator.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:vxu-2390 |
| Date | January 2008 |
| Creators | Fohlin, Maria |
| Publisher | Växjö universitet, Institutionen för humaniora, Växjö : Institutionen för humaniora |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | French |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Doctoral thesis, monograph, info:eu-repo/semantics/doctoralThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
| Relation | Acta Wexionensia, 1404-4307 ; 153 |
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