Translating history timelines or "Negotiating in-iconicity"

Abstract

This article explores the insights provided with regard to translation by two sets of "comparable bilingual" (Bernardini et al.: 2003) corpora composed of Greek and English web-based history timelines. Adopting an iconicity orientation, supportive of the "conceived similarity between conceptual structure and linguistic thought" (Tabakowska: 1999, 410; ef. Fiischer Nanny: 1999, Ljungberg Tabakowska: 2007, de Cuypre: 2008 among others), and assuming that opening entries in timelines may be free of presupposed information and thus license experientally iconic (Enkvist: 1981), "basic level instance" (Firbas: 1992), it examines linearization pattern frequencies in these entries in both languages. The image obtained is rather varied, with verbless clauses, nominalizations less consistently iconic but also less sweeping than originially hypothesized (Calfolgou: 2009) and subject-initial structures holding sway, especially in the English corpus. These results can largely be accounted for by allowing for "competing" forms of iconicity effects on word order in the genre, among which Conradie's (2001) event model, a reflectio of "the flow of time in terms of events experienced and reported upon." Most importantly, they point to an independently motivated unifying framework underlying translation decisions in the two languages, interlingual differences being attributable to different iconicity patterns (cf. Tabakowska: 2003). The translator is thus called upon to mediate between the blueprint of human experience and its imprint on the structure of the specific language pair. The validity of these claims is further explored in relation to translation data from a small sample of (L1) Greek - (L2) English respondents.

Keywords

• translation, history