Belletristic Translation into English: What Price the Same Order of Words?

Abstract

The order of clause constituents in Slovene is largely guided by functional sentence perspective, while its English counterpart is grammar-based and much less flexible. Therefore the English translation of a Slovene clause often displays a different order of constituents. In poetry, however, the position assigned to an entity, action, or concept within a line of verse contributes to the overall meaning, text pattern, and poetic effect. Accordingly, efforts are made to preserve the same order of participants in translation, which often results in the assignment of a new syntactic role to the participant and the restructuring of the entire clause. This paper discusses the most frequent types of restructuring employed in the English translations of select poems by the contemporary Slovene poet Dane Zajc.

Keywords

• linguistics
• translation studies
• contrastive analysis
• word order
• functional sentence perspective