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The Ah! Counts. A corpus-based contrastive approach to the study of pragmatic markers in English and Romanian. Consequences for their translation - Olivia-Cristina Rusu
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Publisher: Editura Universitara
Author: Olivia-Cristina Rusu
Edition: I
Pages: 228
Publisher year: 2022
ISBN: 978-606-28-1528-8
DOI: 10.5682/9786062815288
Product Code:
9786062815288
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The work has a very high scientific degree. The bibliography studied and the corpus analyzed are extremely extensive. It is a pleasant work that arouses curiosity and which, despite the scientific rigor, is easy to read.
Univ. Assoc. Dr. MARINA-LUMINITA MILITARU
Innovative and exciting, Olivia Rusu's research represents, without a doubt, in the landscape of our specialized linguistic studies, a necessary first synthesis - of exemplary clarity - on a category of language that has been given too little attention in the vast studies that make up the field semantics of inflexible parts of speech. Being in the role of "Cinderella" for decades, the interjection is always on a moving and ambiguous ground from a semantic, morphological, pragmatic and translation point of view. The study that Olivia Rusu proposes to us manages to intelligently and comprehensibly pan the ways in which the interjection seems to tell us much more than it allows to be understood at first glance. Allegorically speaking, I tend to think that the interjection takes on the pose of an "iceberg" to which time has revealed (almost only) the (arch)known part of its meanings, the floating part of the body of ice. Capable of an absolutely commendable comparative-contrastive synthesis of interjections from linguistic, pragmatic and translational perspectives, the author has the merit of offering us a careful re-examination of this part of speech, but also an extensive analysis applied to an extremely fertile level - what gives us allows, as readers, to explore in the abysses of the "iceberg" new new reading codes.
Lect. university Dr. SILVIU MIHAILA
Olivia Rusu's study is based on a thorough acquisition and exploitation of specialized literature, considering the following coordinates: the problematic nature of interjections in linguistic studies, the identification of the structural and communicative-functional classification carried out by Romanian and foreign linguists, theoretical orientations from translation studies, applied the particular case of interjections. Based on the detailed presentation of the specialized literature, the author proposes her own directions for classification, translation and exploitation of the characteristics of interjections in the two exemplified languages. The way in which the volume is written is clear, well organized, correctly argued, with attention to the details that can put the reader of a literary work in difficulty, giving proof of ingenuity and attractiveness in the exposition.
Univ. Assoc. Dr. VIORELA-VALENTINA DIMA
Univ. Assoc. Dr. MARINA-LUMINITA MILITARU
Innovative and exciting, Olivia Rusu's research represents, without a doubt, in the landscape of our specialized linguistic studies, a necessary first synthesis - of exemplary clarity - on a category of language that has been given too little attention in the vast studies that make up the field semantics of inflexible parts of speech. Being in the role of "Cinderella" for decades, the interjection is always on a moving and ambiguous ground from a semantic, morphological, pragmatic and translation point of view. The study that Olivia Rusu proposes to us manages to intelligently and comprehensibly pan the ways in which the interjection seems to tell us much more than it allows to be understood at first glance. Allegorically speaking, I tend to think that the interjection takes on the pose of an "iceberg" to which time has revealed (almost only) the (arch)known part of its meanings, the floating part of the body of ice. Capable of an absolutely commendable comparative-contrastive synthesis of interjections from linguistic, pragmatic and translational perspectives, the author has the merit of offering us a careful re-examination of this part of speech, but also an extensive analysis applied to an extremely fertile level - what gives us allows, as readers, to explore in the abysses of the "iceberg" new new reading codes.
Lect. university Dr. SILVIU MIHAILA
Olivia Rusu's study is based on a thorough acquisition and exploitation of specialized literature, considering the following coordinates: the problematic nature of interjections in linguistic studies, the identification of the structural and communicative-functional classification carried out by Romanian and foreign linguists, theoretical orientations from translation studies, applied the particular case of interjections. Based on the detailed presentation of the specialized literature, the author proposes her own directions for classification, translation and exploitation of the characteristics of interjections in the two exemplified languages. The way in which the volume is written is clear, well organized, correctly argued, with attention to the details that can put the reader of a literary work in difficulty, giving proof of ingenuity and attractiveness in the exposition.
Univ. Assoc. Dr. VIORELA-VALENTINA DIMA
-
The Ah! Counts. A corpus-based contrastive approach to the study of pragmatic markers in English and Romanian. Consequences for their translation
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OLIVIA-CRISTINA RUSU is a graduate of the Faculty of Letters of the Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca and a joint master's degree at the Haute-Alsace University in Mulhouse and March Bloch University in Strasbourg, France. He obtained the title of doctor in Philology at the Faculty of Letters of the Alexndru Ioan Cuza University in Iasi, with the qualification Summa cum laude. He is currently a tenured university lecturer at the Academy of Economic Studies in Bucharest, within the Department of Modern Languages and Business Communication, where he teaches French and English for professional and business communication situations. His areas of interest include linguistics, translation studies, pragmatics and the teaching of foreign languages for specific purposes, in order to facilitate the insertion of students into the labor market.
List of abbreviations and symbols: / 12
Introduction / 13
Research methods / 14
Corpus data and methodological procedures for data collection / 15
I. Pragmatic markers: Contrastive Grammatical Characteristics / 17
Tackling interjections / 17
Grammatical historical approach / 20
Contrastive grammatical characteristics / 23
Terminology and etymology / 23
Definitions / 24
General characteristics / 26
Phonetic and phonological features. Intonation and punctuation / 27
Pragmatic markers as peripheral elements / 29
Word, phrase and clause grammar in the survey of pragmatic markers / 29
Description and classification of pragmatic markers in terms of structure / 29
Description and classification of interjections in terms of morphology / 31
Classification in terms of inflection / 31
Classification in terms of derivation / 31
Secondary interjections / 33
Transitions from other word classes / 33
Foul language / 35
Description and distribution of pragmatic markers in terms of meaning / 36
Interjection proper and onomatopoeia / 37
Interjection proper and language formulae / 38
Syntactic independence and a/functionality of pragmatic markers / 41
Communicative grammar in the survey of pragmatic markers / 44
From sentence to text: pragmatic characteristics / 44
Contextual values: communicative functions of pragmatic markers / 45
Functional content of pragmatic markers / 46
Referential pragmatic markers / 49
Onomatopoeia / 49
Informative pragmatic markers / 54
Expressive / emotive pragmatic markers / 54
Conative (imperative) pragmatic markers / 59
Injunctive (hortative) pragmatic markers / 59
Appellative pragmatic markers / 61
Phatic pragmatic markers / 62
Politeness markers / 62
Response forms / 63
Backchannels, cognitive pragmatic markers / 63
Response elicitors / 64
Euphonic fillers – hesitators / 64
Ostensive pragmatic markers / 65
Poetic pragmatic markers / 66
Metalinguistic pragmatic markers / 67
II. Pragmatic Values / 68
Pragmatic markers: a relevance-based theoretical framework / 68
Context and the Principle of Relevance / 70
Procedural semantics of use in the study of pragmatic markers / 73
Communicative clues transmitted by means of pragmatic markers in secondary communication situations / 77
Pragmatic effects conveyed through pragmatic markers / 79
Deixis conveyed through pragmatic markers / 79
Person deixis / 81
Time deixis / 82
Spatial deixis / 83
Discourse deixis / 84
Social deixis / 84
Role, function and expression of pragmatic markers in illocutionary speech acts / 85
Expressive speech acts / 89
Directive speech acts / 91
Commissive speech acts / 92
Representative speech acts / 92
Declarative speech acts / 93
Role, function and expression of pragmatic markers in conversational implicatures / 93
The maxim of quantity / 94
The maxim of quality / 95
The maxim of relevance / 96
The maxim of manner / 96
Role, function and expression of pragmatic markers in conversational presuppositions / 97
Pragmatic markers in conversational structures / 98
Pragmatic implications and associations of pragmatic markers in conversational analysis / 99
On the creativity of common talk / 100
Definitions / 100
Functions of creativity / 100
Features of spoken performance / 101
Children’s language: a practical analysis / 102
III. Strategies for Translating Pragmatic Markers / 104
Translation challenges in reconstructing the meaning of pragmatic markers / 104
Analyses of source text pragmatic markers / 104
Strategies for translating pragmatic markers / 108
Overviews on strategies for translating pragmatic markers / 108
Andrew Chesterman’s problem- centred strategies / 114
Semantic strategies / 114
Synonymy / 115
Antonymy / 116
Hyponymy / 116
Converses / 116
Abstraction change / 117
Distribution change / 117
Emphasis change / 118
Paraphrase / 118
Trope change / 119
Syntactic strategies / 121
Literal translation / 121
Loan, calque / 122
Transposition / 122
Unit shift / 122
Phrase structure change / 123
Clause structure change / 123
Sentence structure change / 124
Cohesion change / 124
Level shift / 124
Scheme / 125
Pragmatic strategies / 125
Cultural filtering / 126
Explicitness change / 127
Information change / 128
Interpersonal change / 128
Illocutionary change / 128
Coherence change / 129
Partial translation / 129
Visibility change / 130
Transediting / 130
Other pragmatic changes / 130
Prospective synopsis of translating pragmatic markers / 131
Optimal strategies for transcoding pragmatic markers / 131
IV. Translating pragmatic markers from children’s literature: corpus-based case studies / 138
Translation challenges in translating pragmatic markers / 138
Survey of Alice’s Adventures in Romanian Translations / 139
The top-down and bottom-up perspectives / 140
Analyse of source and target pragmatic markers / 144
Second level of translation in conveying the meaning of pragmatic markers in a target language / 147
Functional focus and translation strategies from English SL into Romanian TL / 148
The case of referential pragmatic markers / 151
The case of expressive pragmatic markers / 152
The case of conative pragmatic markers / 156
The case of phatic pragmatic markers / 158
The case of poetic pragmatic markers / 160
The case of metalinguistic pragmatic markers / 161
Functional creativity in translating pragmatic markers / 163
Final remarks / 164
V. Annexes / 169
Annex I - Inventory of interjections in Alice in Wonderland, the source text / 169
Annex II / 171
Inventory of interjections in Alice in Wonderland, the target text 1 - Frequency data of interjectional occurrences in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Romanian version of Frida Papadache ([1976] 2014] / 171
Annex III / 174
Inventory of interjections in Alice in Wonderland, the target text 2 / 174
Annex IV. Illustration of LF Aligner use / 176
Annex V. Illustration of AntConc© use / 176
Annex VI - Qualitative survey based on the folding of classes of interjections on translation strategies / 177
Bibliography / 222
Primary sources / 222
Introduction / 13
Research methods / 14
Corpus data and methodological procedures for data collection / 15
I. Pragmatic markers: Contrastive Grammatical Characteristics / 17
Tackling interjections / 17
Grammatical historical approach / 20
Contrastive grammatical characteristics / 23
Terminology and etymology / 23
Definitions / 24
General characteristics / 26
Phonetic and phonological features. Intonation and punctuation / 27
Pragmatic markers as peripheral elements / 29
Word, phrase and clause grammar in the survey of pragmatic markers / 29
Description and classification of pragmatic markers in terms of structure / 29
Description and classification of interjections in terms of morphology / 31
Classification in terms of inflection / 31
Classification in terms of derivation / 31
Secondary interjections / 33
Transitions from other word classes / 33
Foul language / 35
Description and distribution of pragmatic markers in terms of meaning / 36
Interjection proper and onomatopoeia / 37
Interjection proper and language formulae / 38
Syntactic independence and a/functionality of pragmatic markers / 41
Communicative grammar in the survey of pragmatic markers / 44
From sentence to text: pragmatic characteristics / 44
Contextual values: communicative functions of pragmatic markers / 45
Functional content of pragmatic markers / 46
Referential pragmatic markers / 49
Onomatopoeia / 49
Informative pragmatic markers / 54
Expressive / emotive pragmatic markers / 54
Conative (imperative) pragmatic markers / 59
Injunctive (hortative) pragmatic markers / 59
Appellative pragmatic markers / 61
Phatic pragmatic markers / 62
Politeness markers / 62
Response forms / 63
Backchannels, cognitive pragmatic markers / 63
Response elicitors / 64
Euphonic fillers – hesitators / 64
Ostensive pragmatic markers / 65
Poetic pragmatic markers / 66
Metalinguistic pragmatic markers / 67
II. Pragmatic Values / 68
Pragmatic markers: a relevance-based theoretical framework / 68
Context and the Principle of Relevance / 70
Procedural semantics of use in the study of pragmatic markers / 73
Communicative clues transmitted by means of pragmatic markers in secondary communication situations / 77
Pragmatic effects conveyed through pragmatic markers / 79
Deixis conveyed through pragmatic markers / 79
Person deixis / 81
Time deixis / 82
Spatial deixis / 83
Discourse deixis / 84
Social deixis / 84
Role, function and expression of pragmatic markers in illocutionary speech acts / 85
Expressive speech acts / 89
Directive speech acts / 91
Commissive speech acts / 92
Representative speech acts / 92
Declarative speech acts / 93
Role, function and expression of pragmatic markers in conversational implicatures / 93
The maxim of quantity / 94
The maxim of quality / 95
The maxim of relevance / 96
The maxim of manner / 96
Role, function and expression of pragmatic markers in conversational presuppositions / 97
Pragmatic markers in conversational structures / 98
Pragmatic implications and associations of pragmatic markers in conversational analysis / 99
On the creativity of common talk / 100
Definitions / 100
Functions of creativity / 100
Features of spoken performance / 101
Children’s language: a practical analysis / 102
III. Strategies for Translating Pragmatic Markers / 104
Translation challenges in reconstructing the meaning of pragmatic markers / 104
Analyses of source text pragmatic markers / 104
Strategies for translating pragmatic markers / 108
Overviews on strategies for translating pragmatic markers / 108
Andrew Chesterman’s problem- centred strategies / 114
Semantic strategies / 114
Synonymy / 115
Antonymy / 116
Hyponymy / 116
Converses / 116
Abstraction change / 117
Distribution change / 117
Emphasis change / 118
Paraphrase / 118
Trope change / 119
Syntactic strategies / 121
Literal translation / 121
Loan, calque / 122
Transposition / 122
Unit shift / 122
Phrase structure change / 123
Clause structure change / 123
Sentence structure change / 124
Cohesion change / 124
Level shift / 124
Scheme / 125
Pragmatic strategies / 125
Cultural filtering / 126
Explicitness change / 127
Information change / 128
Interpersonal change / 128
Illocutionary change / 128
Coherence change / 129
Partial translation / 129
Visibility change / 130
Transediting / 130
Other pragmatic changes / 130
Prospective synopsis of translating pragmatic markers / 131
Optimal strategies for transcoding pragmatic markers / 131
IV. Translating pragmatic markers from children’s literature: corpus-based case studies / 138
Translation challenges in translating pragmatic markers / 138
Survey of Alice’s Adventures in Romanian Translations / 139
The top-down and bottom-up perspectives / 140
Analyse of source and target pragmatic markers / 144
Second level of translation in conveying the meaning of pragmatic markers in a target language / 147
Functional focus and translation strategies from English SL into Romanian TL / 148
The case of referential pragmatic markers / 151
The case of expressive pragmatic markers / 152
The case of conative pragmatic markers / 156
The case of phatic pragmatic markers / 158
The case of poetic pragmatic markers / 160
The case of metalinguistic pragmatic markers / 161
Functional creativity in translating pragmatic markers / 163
Final remarks / 164
V. Annexes / 169
Annex I - Inventory of interjections in Alice in Wonderland, the source text / 169
Annex II / 171
Inventory of interjections in Alice in Wonderland, the target text 1 - Frequency data of interjectional occurrences in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Romanian version of Frida Papadache ([1976] 2014] / 171
Annex III / 174
Inventory of interjections in Alice in Wonderland, the target text 2 / 174
Annex IV. Illustration of LF Aligner use / 176
Annex V. Illustration of AntConc© use / 176
Annex VI - Qualitative survey based on the folding of classes of interjections on translation strategies / 177
Bibliography / 222
Primary sources / 222
Until recently the standard of grammatical correctness has been the written language. Consequently, spoken language has been considered somehow inferior, while verbal communication forms and structures have been less studied. Spoken language, together with its spontaneously produced forms and structures, has long been regarded as having lower importance as compared to the written expression considered the standard of language adequacy. Moreover, the meaning of spoken utterances is strongly chained into the enunciation context and experience and has the strong tendency to convey subjective information, highlighting the relationship between the speaker and the listener. Thus, pragmatic markers are verbal expressions that are inherent to formal or informal verbal communication and which have not been sufficiently highlighted in dictionaries and grammar books (Carter 2006, 9).
This book is an incursion into the definitions, classifications, functions, and translation strategies of pragmatic markers, with emphasis on the grammar class traditionally called interjections. It ultimately aims to highlight both similarities and differences regarding how this word-class is treated in British and Romanian grammar, as well as to establish the most frequent types of pragmatic markers used in the two languages and their possible correspondences from one language to another. The research is based on the Ph.D. thesis A Corpus-based Contrastive Approach to the Study of Interjections in English and Romanian. Consequences for Their Translation defended at the “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University, Iași, in 2015, having Professor Rodica Dimitriu PhD as academic advisor, and distinguished with a Summa cum Laude. A number of articles have already been published on the research topic, in order to complete the doctoral indicators.
The comprehensive examination of theoretical notions in grammar, pragmatics, and translation theory makes this work useful to students in the Applied Modern Languages Bachelor’s Program of the Faculty of International Business and Economics, of the Bucharest University of Economic Studies, as to all professionals in translation and interpreting. All theoretical notions are amply exemplified with examples from the corpus, offering practical solutions to the use of a comprehensive list of translation strategies. The pragmatic implications and translation strategies are transferable to any type of text or discourse.
Chapter I deals with the grammatical characteristics of pragmatic markers first from a historical perspective, and secondly from a contrastive one, in an attempt to capture all Romanian and English grammatical features. English grammar identifies interjections with the class of conversational words (i.e. ‘non-sentences’, ‘inserts’ or ‘pragmatic markers’), along with various forms of discourse and politeness (greetings, apologies, toasts, etc.) markers, reaction, and attention (alarm) signals, response elicitors, hesitations, hedges, vocatives and expletives. Romanian grammar provides a detailed etymological, structural, formal, and functional classification, but does not offer examples of spoken language, which are abundant in the English corpus-descriptive grammar. These generous investigations led to the elaboration of a personal classification of pragmatic markers based on Jakobson’s language functions.
Chapter II center-stages the pragmatic values of pragmatic markers from a general perspective as well as from a Relevance Theory stance. It has been noticed that, although they seem insignificant, pragmatic markers are found in speech acts, implicatures, and presuppositions. My most significant contribution to the second chapter consists in the investigation of the peculiarities of demotic creativity and in the exploration of the pragmatic relational functions of pragmatic markers in juvenile language as well as in a child-specific type of discourse belonging to the folk memory: nursery rhymes.
Chapter III considers the methods and strategies of transferring the meaning conveyed through pragmatic markers from English to Romanian. Trying to recreate the meaning of creative, spoken discourse is a translation challenge. I finally developed my classification of translation strategies which I consider optimal for conveying the meaning of pragmatic markers into a target language.
Chapter IV, the last part of the research, is an ample and detailed practical analysis that tackles the possible translation challenges in conveying the meaning of pragmatic markers. I have chosen one single literary work to compare elaborately two of its versions into Romanian, from a contrastive perspective. Applied analyses conclude that functional and idiomatic creativity is an important factor for the most appropriate transfer of pragmatic markers from English to Romanian.
Research methods
This study makes use of quantitative research methods, such as surveys of pragmatic markers, statistics, and inventories, as well as the analysis of a corpus of pragmatic markers, to establish the most frequent types of pragmatic markers used in the two languages and their possible equivalents from one language to another. The qualitative research primarily consists of the contrastive analyses of the source texts of the corpus. Secondly, I examine the corpus analysis from a translation perspective.
For an accurate analysis of pragmatic markers, I particularly relied on the relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson 1986, 1995) and its application to translations (Gutt, 1991), on theories of human communication in general (Grice, 1975, Levinson, 1983, Yule, 1996), on the theory of speech acts (Searle, 1969, Austin, 1962) as well as on pragmatic orientations in translation studies: taxonomies of equivalence, the equivalence of effect (Catford, 1965, Nida, 1964) theories encompassing both the translation product and the translating process (Vinay and Darbelnet’s and Chesterman's models, 1958), functional theories (Nord, 2005, 2006), theoretical approaches to discourse analysis, and, again, its application to translation (Munday, 2008), and guidelines of the polysystem theory (Toury, 1978).
The contrastive approach is obviously extremely important in this research and it is emphasized through the continuous bridges that were established between pragmatic markers in English and Romanian, under all aspects, from how they are treated in grammar, to their pragmatic functions and the consequences for their translation.
The whole approach is interdisciplinary, combining acquisitions from linguistics, pragmatics, stylistics, translation studies, and theories of communication. Elements of literary theory, history, sociology etc., are also studied in my endeavor to fully understand the meanings conveyed through pragmatic markers. Considerations from linguistic, cognitive, pragmatic, sociolinguistic, and functional theories justify and generate applicative implications concerning the possibilities of translating pragmatic markers from English into Romanian making use of linguistic and pragmatic acquisitions in translation studies.
Corpus data and methodological procedures for data collection
All theoretical aspects related to grammar, pragmatics, and translation of pragmatic markers are illustrated with examples extracted from a literary corpus digitalized by myself. More specifically, all the explanatory data presented in this research were collected from a corpus of ten English books of children’s literature written by British and American novelists: Sir James Matthew Barrie, Rudyard Kipling, Lewis Carroll, Alan Alexander Milne, Pamela Lyndon Travers, Lyman Frank Baum, Michael Bond, Shel Silverstein, Oscar Wilde, and a selection of Nursery Rhymes edited by L.K. Alchin. In order to exemplify the translation strategies, the books were studied in parallel with their Romanian versions. The chosen titles are: Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (Barrie, 1910), Peter Pan în grădina Kensington (Barrie, 2005, translation by Nina Stănculescu); The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Baum, 2000), Vrăjitorul din Oz (Baum, 2000, translation by Joszefina and Camil Baltazar); A Bear Called Paddington (Bond, 1992), Un urs pe nume Paddington (Bond, 2012, translation by Iulia Arsintescu); Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Carroll, 2000), Alice în Ţara Minunilor (Carroll, [1976] 2014, translation by Frida Papadache, and Carroll, 2007, translation by Mirella Acsente); Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (Carroll, 1991), Alice în limea oglinzii (Carroll, 2014, translation by Frida Papadache), The Jungle Book (Kipling, 2012), Cartea Junglei (Kipling, 2004, translation by Mihnea Gheorghiu); Winnie-the-Pooh (Milne, 2004), Ursuleţul Winnie Puh (Milne, 2013, translation by Luiza Vasiliu and lyrics translated by Florin Bican); The House at Pooh Corner (Milne, 1928), Ursuleţul Winnie Puh. Căsuţa de pe Strada Puh (Milne, 2014, translation by Luiza Vasiliu and lyrics translated by Florin Bican), LAFCADIO, THE LION WHO SHOT BACK (Silverstein, 1991), Povestea unchiului Shelby despre Lafcadio, leul care nu s-a lăsat păgubaş (Silverstein, 2012, translation by Alexandra Columban), Mary Poppins. The complete collection (Travers, 1994), Mary Poppins (Travers, 1994, translation by Silvia Kerim), The Happy Prince and Other Tales (Wilde, 2006), Prinţul fericit (Wilde, 1991, in Văduva-Poenaru şi Goci (eds.), translation by Const. I. Bondescu). For a comprehensive grammatical illustration of Romanian pragmatic markers, original idiomatic examples have been extracted from Ion Creangă’s Memories of My Boyhood. In order to highlight phonological, lexical, syntactical, and discursive similarities between pragmatic markers and children’s language, I extracted examples from CHILDES, a virtual corpus that contains genuine spoken interactions with children. In the last section I have chosen one single literary work and its corresponding Romanian translation – namely, Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland - for both a comprehensive linguistic and pragmatic investigation and an ample contrastive and statistic examination of pragmatic markers applied to their translation.
The main methodological procedure concerned working on text corpora by using either computer-generated software or traditional ‘manual’ ways of handling text corpora. However unapproachable they might seem, computerized corpus tools can be adapted to any type of linguistic investigation. The first step of this process was to get hold of both source and target texts. If finding English texts was relatively easy - due both to copyright expiration and to digital precise replicas (e.g. BookVirtual™ or the free e-books of the Project Gutenberg), obtaining accurate electronic versions of Romanian translations required a more elaborate process. The Romanian versions were either purchased or borrowed from Iaşi University Library and scanned into non-readable.pdf formats. Texts were then converted into readable .docx or.txt formats, using Abbyy®, a software that provides optical character recognition. The text ‘domestication’ stage proved rather painful, as no matter how advanced Abbyy® is, the converted texts abounded in unrecognized characters and signs which had to be ‘manually’ removed in Microsoft Word. Two possibilities have been found for terminology extraction.
1) / A patience-demanding and time-consuming alignment of the source and target text segments can be performed with the open-source software LF Aligner 3.0 followed by texts upload in the ParaConc software. The latter is a computer program especially made for working with parallel corpora of source and target texts, which allows terminology search. It immediately finds all corresponding translations of one term only if text segments have been formerly aligned. The fact that two (or more) target texts can be uploaded in both LF Aligner and ParaConc (and, in this way, different diachronic translations can be studied simultaneously) has been helpful to my research. Moreover, once aligned and saved, texts can then be used as translation memories (TM) by professional translators.
2) / For the quantitative research, I opted for extracting pragmatic markers, using AntConc©, a concordance software that requires.txt format of the texts and displays all hits of a search, within their co-texts. This method was supported by a rigorous recheck of the results through complete text reading resuming. A helpful feature of AntConc is the possibility of searching all terms from a pre-saved list. According to the definition of the pragmatic markers suggested in the first chapter, all pragmatic markers have been extracted by means of traditional reading and classified according to my taxonomy of the pragmatic markers, based on language functions.
The meanings of the pragmatic markers were also examined making use of well-known English and Romanian dictionaries mentioned in the bibliography. Pragmatic markers were classified according to their functions typology established in Chapter I. Parallel investigations and comparisons between the original pragmatic markers and their counterparts in two TTs were performed in Chapter IV, in order to establish the most common types of translation strategies.
This book is an incursion into the definitions, classifications, functions, and translation strategies of pragmatic markers, with emphasis on the grammar class traditionally called interjections. It ultimately aims to highlight both similarities and differences regarding how this word-class is treated in British and Romanian grammar, as well as to establish the most frequent types of pragmatic markers used in the two languages and their possible correspondences from one language to another. The research is based on the Ph.D. thesis A Corpus-based Contrastive Approach to the Study of Interjections in English and Romanian. Consequences for Their Translation defended at the “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University, Iași, in 2015, having Professor Rodica Dimitriu PhD as academic advisor, and distinguished with a Summa cum Laude. A number of articles have already been published on the research topic, in order to complete the doctoral indicators.
The comprehensive examination of theoretical notions in grammar, pragmatics, and translation theory makes this work useful to students in the Applied Modern Languages Bachelor’s Program of the Faculty of International Business and Economics, of the Bucharest University of Economic Studies, as to all professionals in translation and interpreting. All theoretical notions are amply exemplified with examples from the corpus, offering practical solutions to the use of a comprehensive list of translation strategies. The pragmatic implications and translation strategies are transferable to any type of text or discourse.
Chapter I deals with the grammatical characteristics of pragmatic markers first from a historical perspective, and secondly from a contrastive one, in an attempt to capture all Romanian and English grammatical features. English grammar identifies interjections with the class of conversational words (i.e. ‘non-sentences’, ‘inserts’ or ‘pragmatic markers’), along with various forms of discourse and politeness (greetings, apologies, toasts, etc.) markers, reaction, and attention (alarm) signals, response elicitors, hesitations, hedges, vocatives and expletives. Romanian grammar provides a detailed etymological, structural, formal, and functional classification, but does not offer examples of spoken language, which are abundant in the English corpus-descriptive grammar. These generous investigations led to the elaboration of a personal classification of pragmatic markers based on Jakobson’s language functions.
Chapter II center-stages the pragmatic values of pragmatic markers from a general perspective as well as from a Relevance Theory stance. It has been noticed that, although they seem insignificant, pragmatic markers are found in speech acts, implicatures, and presuppositions. My most significant contribution to the second chapter consists in the investigation of the peculiarities of demotic creativity and in the exploration of the pragmatic relational functions of pragmatic markers in juvenile language as well as in a child-specific type of discourse belonging to the folk memory: nursery rhymes.
Chapter III considers the methods and strategies of transferring the meaning conveyed through pragmatic markers from English to Romanian. Trying to recreate the meaning of creative, spoken discourse is a translation challenge. I finally developed my classification of translation strategies which I consider optimal for conveying the meaning of pragmatic markers into a target language.
Chapter IV, the last part of the research, is an ample and detailed practical analysis that tackles the possible translation challenges in conveying the meaning of pragmatic markers. I have chosen one single literary work to compare elaborately two of its versions into Romanian, from a contrastive perspective. Applied analyses conclude that functional and idiomatic creativity is an important factor for the most appropriate transfer of pragmatic markers from English to Romanian.
Research methods
This study makes use of quantitative research methods, such as surveys of pragmatic markers, statistics, and inventories, as well as the analysis of a corpus of pragmatic markers, to establish the most frequent types of pragmatic markers used in the two languages and their possible equivalents from one language to another. The qualitative research primarily consists of the contrastive analyses of the source texts of the corpus. Secondly, I examine the corpus analysis from a translation perspective.
For an accurate analysis of pragmatic markers, I particularly relied on the relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson 1986, 1995) and its application to translations (Gutt, 1991), on theories of human communication in general (Grice, 1975, Levinson, 1983, Yule, 1996), on the theory of speech acts (Searle, 1969, Austin, 1962) as well as on pragmatic orientations in translation studies: taxonomies of equivalence, the equivalence of effect (Catford, 1965, Nida, 1964) theories encompassing both the translation product and the translating process (Vinay and Darbelnet’s and Chesterman's models, 1958), functional theories (Nord, 2005, 2006), theoretical approaches to discourse analysis, and, again, its application to translation (Munday, 2008), and guidelines of the polysystem theory (Toury, 1978).
The contrastive approach is obviously extremely important in this research and it is emphasized through the continuous bridges that were established between pragmatic markers in English and Romanian, under all aspects, from how they are treated in grammar, to their pragmatic functions and the consequences for their translation.
The whole approach is interdisciplinary, combining acquisitions from linguistics, pragmatics, stylistics, translation studies, and theories of communication. Elements of literary theory, history, sociology etc., are also studied in my endeavor to fully understand the meanings conveyed through pragmatic markers. Considerations from linguistic, cognitive, pragmatic, sociolinguistic, and functional theories justify and generate applicative implications concerning the possibilities of translating pragmatic markers from English into Romanian making use of linguistic and pragmatic acquisitions in translation studies.
Corpus data and methodological procedures for data collection
All theoretical aspects related to grammar, pragmatics, and translation of pragmatic markers are illustrated with examples extracted from a literary corpus digitalized by myself. More specifically, all the explanatory data presented in this research were collected from a corpus of ten English books of children’s literature written by British and American novelists: Sir James Matthew Barrie, Rudyard Kipling, Lewis Carroll, Alan Alexander Milne, Pamela Lyndon Travers, Lyman Frank Baum, Michael Bond, Shel Silverstein, Oscar Wilde, and a selection of Nursery Rhymes edited by L.K. Alchin. In order to exemplify the translation strategies, the books were studied in parallel with their Romanian versions. The chosen titles are: Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens (Barrie, 1910), Peter Pan în grădina Kensington (Barrie, 2005, translation by Nina Stănculescu); The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (Baum, 2000), Vrăjitorul din Oz (Baum, 2000, translation by Joszefina and Camil Baltazar); A Bear Called Paddington (Bond, 1992), Un urs pe nume Paddington (Bond, 2012, translation by Iulia Arsintescu); Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (Carroll, 2000), Alice în Ţara Minunilor (Carroll, [1976] 2014, translation by Frida Papadache, and Carroll, 2007, translation by Mirella Acsente); Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (Carroll, 1991), Alice în limea oglinzii (Carroll, 2014, translation by Frida Papadache), The Jungle Book (Kipling, 2012), Cartea Junglei (Kipling, 2004, translation by Mihnea Gheorghiu); Winnie-the-Pooh (Milne, 2004), Ursuleţul Winnie Puh (Milne, 2013, translation by Luiza Vasiliu and lyrics translated by Florin Bican); The House at Pooh Corner (Milne, 1928), Ursuleţul Winnie Puh. Căsuţa de pe Strada Puh (Milne, 2014, translation by Luiza Vasiliu and lyrics translated by Florin Bican), LAFCADIO, THE LION WHO SHOT BACK (Silverstein, 1991), Povestea unchiului Shelby despre Lafcadio, leul care nu s-a lăsat păgubaş (Silverstein, 2012, translation by Alexandra Columban), Mary Poppins. The complete collection (Travers, 1994), Mary Poppins (Travers, 1994, translation by Silvia Kerim), The Happy Prince and Other Tales (Wilde, 2006), Prinţul fericit (Wilde, 1991, in Văduva-Poenaru şi Goci (eds.), translation by Const. I. Bondescu). For a comprehensive grammatical illustration of Romanian pragmatic markers, original idiomatic examples have been extracted from Ion Creangă’s Memories of My Boyhood. In order to highlight phonological, lexical, syntactical, and discursive similarities between pragmatic markers and children’s language, I extracted examples from CHILDES, a virtual corpus that contains genuine spoken interactions with children. In the last section I have chosen one single literary work and its corresponding Romanian translation – namely, Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland - for both a comprehensive linguistic and pragmatic investigation and an ample contrastive and statistic examination of pragmatic markers applied to their translation.
The main methodological procedure concerned working on text corpora by using either computer-generated software or traditional ‘manual’ ways of handling text corpora. However unapproachable they might seem, computerized corpus tools can be adapted to any type of linguistic investigation. The first step of this process was to get hold of both source and target texts. If finding English texts was relatively easy - due both to copyright expiration and to digital precise replicas (e.g. BookVirtual™ or the free e-books of the Project Gutenberg), obtaining accurate electronic versions of Romanian translations required a more elaborate process. The Romanian versions were either purchased or borrowed from Iaşi University Library and scanned into non-readable.pdf formats. Texts were then converted into readable .docx or.txt formats, using Abbyy®, a software that provides optical character recognition. The text ‘domestication’ stage proved rather painful, as no matter how advanced Abbyy® is, the converted texts abounded in unrecognized characters and signs which had to be ‘manually’ removed in Microsoft Word. Two possibilities have been found for terminology extraction.
1) / A patience-demanding and time-consuming alignment of the source and target text segments can be performed with the open-source software LF Aligner 3.0 followed by texts upload in the ParaConc software. The latter is a computer program especially made for working with parallel corpora of source and target texts, which allows terminology search. It immediately finds all corresponding translations of one term only if text segments have been formerly aligned. The fact that two (or more) target texts can be uploaded in both LF Aligner and ParaConc (and, in this way, different diachronic translations can be studied simultaneously) has been helpful to my research. Moreover, once aligned and saved, texts can then be used as translation memories (TM) by professional translators.
2) / For the quantitative research, I opted for extracting pragmatic markers, using AntConc©, a concordance software that requires.txt format of the texts and displays all hits of a search, within their co-texts. This method was supported by a rigorous recheck of the results through complete text reading resuming. A helpful feature of AntConc is the possibility of searching all terms from a pre-saved list. According to the definition of the pragmatic markers suggested in the first chapter, all pragmatic markers have been extracted by means of traditional reading and classified according to my taxonomy of the pragmatic markers, based on language functions.
The meanings of the pragmatic markers were also examined making use of well-known English and Romanian dictionaries mentioned in the bibliography. Pragmatic markers were classified according to their functions typology established in Chapter I. Parallel investigations and comparisons between the original pragmatic markers and their counterparts in two TTs were performed in Chapter IV, in order to establish the most common types of translation strategies.
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