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Clause connectives in Finnish children’s literature 171
Table 1. Occurrences of connectives per 100 000 words in Finnish originals and Finnish
translations
Originals
Translations
jo(t)ka ‘which’, ‘who’ 319.8 357.2
jo(i)ssa ‘in which’, ‘where’ 75.0 45.5
että, ettei(vät) ‘that’, ‘that not’,
‘in order to’, ‘in order not to’ 1129.5 1155.7
kun ‘when’, ‘because’ 661.6 809.3
jos, jollei(vät) ‘if’, ‘if not’ 252.0 268.7
vaikka, vaikkei(vät)
‘although’, ‘although not’ 126.3 111.3
koska ‘because’ 69.6 76.2
ennen kuin ‘before’ 46.1 95.3
jotta, jottei(vät)
‘in order to’, ‘in order not to’ 11.2 56.7
mutta, muttei(vät) ‘but’, ‘but not’ 786.1 796.2
sillä ‘for’ 84.0 81.5
vaan ‘but’ 41.1 33.4
kuitenkin ‘however’ 58.1 46.7
siksi ‘therefore’ 22.3 21.2
4.1 Connectives more frequent in translations
The temporal conjunction kun ‘when’, which is sometimes also used causally,
is considerably more frequent in translations (809.3 vs. 661.6 occurrences per
100 000 words). It seems to occur in word combinations such as the ones shown
in Table 2 (the figures for individual items in Table 2 indicate absolute, not
relative frequencies).
These time expressions are clearly more common in translations, although
there is no apparent reason for avoiding them in Finnish originals, as all of
them are perfectly acceptable Finnish expressions. Nevertheless, at least most
of them are likely to have been triggered by a formally more or less equivalent
English phrase (juuri kun ← just when, nyt kun ← now that, sillä/samalla
hetkellä kun ← at the same time as), which suggests that, when possible,
translators tend to translate the ST expression literally into Finnish.
The explicative and purpose conjunction että ‘that’, ‘in order to’ is more
frequent in the translation subcorpus. However, its positive/neutral and negative
forms (että can also appear in a negative clause separate from the negating
word ei, e.g. että hän ei ollut ‘that he was not’; ettei(vät) merges the conjunc-