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.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:lnu-86270 |
| Date | January 2019 |
| Creators | Kjellström, Antonia |
| Publisher | Linnéuniversitetet, Institutionen för språk (SPR) |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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