The order of thought and the order of words. Minties eiga ir žodžių tvarka

Abstract

From the point of view of translation strategy, translators seem to fall between two positions. Some of them (like Shapiro and his adherents) believe that the source text should sound completelyneutral and natural in the target language. Typically, they prefer standard target language sentence patterns to achieve a smooth and transparent translation. Other translators (like Venuti and his followers) say that awkward wording in the target language should remain to remind the readers that they are reading a translation.The present article addresses this controversy with respect to one formal phenomenon – sentence patterns, or word order, – and one discourse phenomenon – the communicative status of entities described by sentences.In communication, the speaker/writer is naturally disposed to lean on what is known to, or shared by, the speaker/writer and the hearer/reader and to proceed towards the information whichis most important. Such a disposition makes the user of the language ignore the grammatical principle of word order,1 or, in other words, transform the grammatical word order pattern Subject+Predicate+Object+Adjunct in different ways to achieve particular communicative goals.The question arises whether sentence production in different languages is governed by the communicative intensions to the same extent. Lithuanian and English are particularly interesting inthis respect as they differ typologically: in Lithuanian, the sentence is produced in accordance with the principle of FSP, or the communicative principle; while in English, the sentence isproduced according to the grammatical principle.In all probability, the Lithuanian grammatical word order pattern is more liable to transformation than the English grammatical pattern. This presumption, however, only raises the interest in the realization of the communicative perspective of the Lithuanian sentence in English calling for a repeated attempt at the communicative sentence analysis. ----- Šiame straipsnyje pateikiama vertimo analizė, atsižvelgiant į kalbų struktūrinius skirtingumus ir galimybes, kurias suteikia funkcinės sakinio perspektyvos (FSP) realizavimas. Pateikiami lietuvių grožinės literatūros tekstai ir jų angliškieji vertimai, siekiant nustatyti, kokią rolę funkcinės sakinio perspektyvos perteikime vaidina žodžių tvarka. Analizė atskleidžia nepanaudotų galimybių sritis, o antra vertus, ir priemones, kurios įgalina išreikšti funkcinę lietuviškojo sakinio perspektyvą, arba minties eigą, vertime.