Topics in Language Resources for Translation ... - ymerleksi - home

Chapter 2. Interactive reference grammars 33verdanken, dass wir das Jahr dann doch noch mit einem solch gewaltigenErfolg beenden konnten.Here, two options of translating English clefts into German are shown: The firstEnglish cleft sentence is nominalised using the German adverbial Mit dieser Beteiligung(with this ownership), whereas in example (5) and (6) German infinitivalconstructions are chosen. In the latter examples a lexical pattern for translatingclefts becomes visible: The translators used es ist jemandem/etwas zu verdanken,dass (it is somebody/something to thank that) for the translation of both Englishcleft sentences. This might be an indicator for a good translation strategy for clefts.To find other strategies, it can be specified in the corpus query whether the cleftedelement is translated and thus aligned with a German adverbial, a German subjector other realisations.Applying the same query to the sub-corpus of popular-scientific texts, thefollowing examples can be found:(7) ... it is N that makes this one-way function reversible – Es ist dieses N, dasdie Einwegfunktion umkehrbar macht, . . .(8) It is these properties that make them attractive as anticancer agents. – Geradediese Eigenschaften lassen sie als Wirkstoffe gegen Krebs vielversprechenderscheinen.(9) It is they alone that persist from one generation to the next – Nur die Genebleiben in der Generationenabfolge erhalten.(10) History records that it was Galileo who was foremost in establishing . . . – DieGeschichte belegt, daß vor allem Galilei . . . etablierte.Here again, two options of translating English clefts into German are illustrated:The first English cleft sentence, which provides a description or definition of aprocess, is literally translated into German. So, this seems to be an appropriatecontext for preserving the structure of cleft sentences. Examples (8) to (10) showthat for the compensation of cleft sentences it seems to be a typical translationstrategy to choose a focus particle in German. Here, the particles gerade (even),nur (only)andvor allem (above all) are used to signal the syntactic focus.The concordances discussed in the present section clearly show that there aredifferent translation preferences for different registers. For this reason it is usefulto consult corpora which are relevant in terms of their registers. Clefting is a goodexample for register-specific translation behaviour.3.4 Substitution and deletionAccording to Hawkins (1986), substitutions and deletions occur more frequentlyin English than in German. This means that the translator has to find different