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168 Tiina Puurtinen
(1) Hän katsoi aurinkoisesti äitiään tietäen saaneensa jo anteeksi.
(Daniels 1998:7)
literally: ‘She looked sunnily at her mother knowing herself to have been
forgiven already.’
Hän katsoi aurinkoisesti äitiään, sillä hän tiesi, että oli jo saanut anteeksi.
(TP)
‘. . . because she knew that she had already been forgiven.’
In example (2), the first alternative includes a premodified participial attribute
construction and the second uses an equivalent relative clause beginning with
the relative pronoun joka ‘who’, ‘which’.
(2) Ja tiedäthän sinä, Mandy, että lampaan kimppuun hyökännyt koira on
lupa ampua. (Daniels 1996:59)
‘And you do know, Mandy, that a-sheep-attacked-dog is allowed to be
shot.’
... että on lupa ampua koira, joka on hyökännyt lampaan kimppuun. (TP)
‘. . . that it is allowed to shoot a dog which has attacked a sheep.’
Relative clauses cannot, however, always be replaced with such compact structures,
and therefore a writer or translator may not have several options to
choose from.
NCs are likely to decrease the readability and speakability (ease of reading
aloud) of a text, which are important qualities in a children’s book. Cloze
tests and reading aloud tests have shown that a high frequency of NCs makes a
text significantly more difficult for children to both understand and read aloud
fluently than the use of corresponding finite constructions with connectives
(see Puurtinen 1995 for details). Surprisingly, previous research (Puurtinen
1995, 2003) has revealed that despite their negative effect on readability, NCs
are relatively frequently used in translated children’s literature. In English –
Finnish translations of children’s books published between 1940 and 1998, the
frequency of NCs is significantly higher than in originally Finnish children’s
books from the same period. Moreover, NCs seem to have been becoming increasingly
more common in translations since the 1970s. As NCs are associated
with lack of connectives (as examples (1) and (2) show), it might be assumed
that Finnish translations of children’s books would have lower frequencies of
clause connectives than non-translations. This assumption of course contradicts
the explicitation hypothesis. The previous findings about the high frequency
of NCs in translations can in themselves be interpreted as evidence
contrary to the hypothesis. It is interesting that Eskola’s corpus study (2002)