Käännöskirjallisuuden puhekielisyyksistä - kaksinkertaista illuusiota?

• Sampo Nevalainen

Avainsanat: korpuslingvistiikka, käännöskirjallisuus, puhekielisyys

Abstrakti

Colloquialisms in translated Finnish fiction (englanti)

1/2003 (107)

Colloquialisms in translated Finnish fiction

The article examines the use of everyday colloquialisms in works of fiction translated into Finnish. The analysis is mainly from a quantitative viewpoint, using the methods of corpus linguistics to compare translated Finnish with original Finnish. The material comprises two subcorpora taken from the Corpus of Translated Finnish (compiled at the Savonlinna School of Translation Studies): one consists of translated fiction, and the other of comparable original Finnish. The study is descriptive in nature and is restricted to lexical manifestations of colloquialisms (phonetic form and vocabulary). Based on the general presumption that translations are conservative in comparison to original texts, it is hypothesised that both the extent and frequency of colloquialisms are greater in original fiction than in translated fiction. The context of the study is the broader question of the representativeness and comparability of language corpora.

Colloquialisms are examined using 14 groups of words determined from corpus-based key word lists. The analysis reveals that the words generally appear more extensively (number of works) and more often (frequency) in the original Finnish than in the translated Finnish. It is also found that the authors style or chosen strategy has a clear impact on the use of the words examined. The strategic nature of colloquialisation is particularly evident in the translations, as the accumulation of the studied features in certain works is more apparent in the translation corpus than in the corpus of original texts. Generally speaking, the authors of the original texts tend to make better use of the different levels of language in their colloquialisation strategy than the translators do in their texts.

The following general conclusions are drawn regarding the comparability of language corpora: firstly, the features of everyday colloquial language established using key word lists correspond well with features described in the literature on spoken Finnish; secondly, the most common features of all have a similar prevalence and frequency in both corpora; and thirdly, the general differences noted between the two corpora also apply in the case of less common features. These results correspond with earlier findings and with assumptions based on empirical research.

Sampo Nevalainen



Kielenainekset

-kO (kieli: suomi, sivulla: 10)
-kO (kieli: suomi, sivulla: 15)
-kO (kieli: suomi, sivulla: 9)
-ks (kieli: suomi, sivulla: 10)
-ks (kieli: suomi, sivulla: 15)
ah (kieli: suomi, sivulla: 17)
ah (kieli: suomi, sivulla: 8)
ai (kieli: suomi, sivulla: 17)
ai (