Cohesion in Polish-English Translation and Its Implications for Translator Training

• Authors: Marcin Lewandowski

Abstracts

EN

This paper focuses on the ways of maintaining cohesive links in the translation process in the Polish-English language pair. Of primary interest is how the thematic/rhematic structure of Polish sentences can be successfully rendered in English to produce cohesive, natural-sounding and communicative target texts with a proper information flow. These aspects have implications for translation teaching. It has been observed that, in view of the differences between Polish and English word order, university students at the start of their translator training experience two general problems as they attempt to translate longer stretches of text into English: (1) they produce cohesive passages, which contain errors in word order (due to syntactic interference from Polish) or (2) they produce grammatically correct sentences, which, however, form incohesive passages (i.e. ones in which the thematic/rhematic progression is not retained) with an inappropriate information structure. For this reason, students need to become acquainted with some practical solutions that help build cohesion in Polish-English translation. These include (1) shifts from active to passive, (2) other shifts in syntactic functions, (3) fronting, and (4) inventing sentence subjects out of broader context.

Keywords

EN

translator training; contrastive grammar; Polish-English translation; cohesion in translation; word order

• Publisher: Uniwersytet Łódzki. Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Łódzkiego
• Journal: Research in Language
• Year: 2020
• Volume: 18
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 219-233

Dates

published

2020

Contributors

author

Marcin Lewandowski

• Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań

References

• Baker, Mona. 1992. In other words (A coursebook on translation). London/New York, Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203133590
• Belczyk, Arkadiusz. 2002. Poradnik tłumacza: z angielskiego na nasze. Kraków: Idea.
• Biber, Douglas, Johansson Stig, Leech Geoffrey, Conrad Susan and Finegan Eward. 1999. The Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. London, Longman.
• Blum-Kulka, Shoshana 1986. Shifts of cohesion and coherence in translation. In J. House and S. Blum-Kulka (eds.), Interlingual and Intercultural Communication: Discourseand Cognition in Translation and Second Language Acquisition Studies, 17-36. Tübingen: Gunter Narr.
• Chesterman, Andrew. 2004. Hypotheses about translation universals. In G. Hansen, K. Malmkjær and D. Gile (eds.), Claims, Changes and Challenges in Translation Studies: Selected contributions from the EST Congress, Copenhagen 2001, 1-13. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. https://doi.org/10.1075/btl.50.02che
• Duszak, Anna. 1987. The dynamics of topics in English and Polish. Warszawa: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego.
• Fisiak, Jacek, Lipińska-Grzegorek Maria, and Zabrocki Tadeusz. 1978. An introductory English-Polish contrastive grammar. Warszawa: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe.
• Górnicz, Mariusz. (2014) Hipertematy a szyk zdania w polskich tekstach specjalistycznych. In M. Kornacka (ed.), Spójność tekstu specjalistycznego, 21-29. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Instytutu Kulturologii i Lingwistyki Antropocentrycznej Uniwersytet Warszawski.
• Halliday, Michael A. K. 1985. An introduction to functional grammar, London: Edward Amold.
• Halliday, Michael A. K. and Hasan Ruqaiya. 1976. Cohesion in English. London: Longman.
• Hatim, Basil. 2003. Text linguistics and translation. In M. Baker (ed.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, 262-265. New York: Routledge.
• Hu, Helen Chau. 1999. Cohesion and coherence in translation theory and pedagogy, Word, 50(1), 33-46. https://doi.org/10.1080/00437956.1999.11432482
• Kaczmarek, Karolina. 2014. Interpretacja terminologii związanej z teorią tekstu w aspekcie spójności (aspekt synchroniczny i diachroniczny w kształtowaniu się znaczeń na przykładzie terminów kohezja i koherencja)”. In M. Kornacka (ed.), Spójność tekstu specjalistycznego, 30-39. Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Naukowe Instytutu Kulturologii i Lingwistyki Antropocentrycznej Uniwersytet Warszawski.
• Kerremans, Koen. 2017. Applying computer-assistedcoreferential analysis to a study ofterminological variation in multilingualparallel corpora. In K. Menzel, E. Lapshinova-Koltunski, and K. Kerstin (eds.), New perspectives on cohesion and coherence: Implications for translation, 49-74. Berlin: Language Science Press.
• Kunilovskaya, Maria and Kutuzov Andrey. 2017. Testing target text fluency: A machine learning approach to detecting syntactic translationese in English-Russian translation. In K. Menzel, E. Lapshinova-Koltunski and K. Kerstin (eds.), New perspectives on cohesion and coherence: Implications for translation,75-103. Berlin: Language Science Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110459586-010
• Lautimatti, Liisa. 1987. Observations on the development of the topic of simplified discourse. In U. Connor and R. B. Kaplan (eds.), Writing across languages: Analysis of L2 text, 87-114. Reading: Addison-Wesley.
• Majchrzak, Konrad. 1978. The structure of the noun phrase in English and Polish: a contrastive analysis (unpublished PhD dissertation), Poznań.
• Menzel, Katrin, Lapshinova-Koltunski Ekaterina and Kerstin Kunz. 2017. Cohesion and coherence in multilingual contexts. In K. Menzel, E. Lapshinova-Koltunski and K. Kerstin (eds.), New perspectives on cohesion and coherence: Implications for translation, 1-10. Berlin: Language Science Press.
• Schäffner, Christina. 2000. Running before walking? Designing a translation program at undergraduate level. In C. Schäffner and B. Adab (eds.), Developing translation competence, 143-157. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. https://doi.org/10.1075/btl.38.14sch
• Szwedek, Aleksander. 1981. Word order, sentence stress and reference in English and Polish. Bydgoszcz: Wydawnictwo Uczelniane WSP.
• Tanskanen, Sanna-Kaisa. 2006. Collaborating Towards Coherence: Lexical Cohesionin English Discourse. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.146
• Williams, Joseph M. 1994. Style: Ten Lessons in Clarity and Grace. New York: HarperCollins.
• Willim, Ewa and Mańczak-Wohlfeld Elźbieta. 1997. A contrastive approach to problems with English.Warszawa/Kraków: Państwowe Wydawnictwo Naukowe.

Identifiers

DOI

10.18778/1731-7533.18.2.06

Biblioteka Nauki

1368401