RENDERING THE BEST RESULTS INTO ROMANIAN – A MATTER OF TYPOLOGICAL VARIATION

Authors

  • RUXANDRA DRĂGAN University of Bucharest Author

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.62229/aubllrlxxii/23/4

Keywords:

resultative construction, Manner, Result, lexicalization patterns, translation strategies

Abstract

English (Germanic) and Romanian (Romance) are typologically different in the expression of both change-of-location and change-of-state events (cf. Talmy 1985, 2000). English favours Goal of Motion (GM) and resultative constructions, which combine
manner verbs with directional PPs and Result Phrases, respectively; Romanian typically opts for inherently directed motion and change-of-state verbs to achieve the same goals. At the same time, the existing typological differences have been shown to impact both the translation strategies rendering change events, and the syntactic structures they produce (Slobin 2004, 2005, 2006; Capelle 2012; Alonso 2018 et al.). The present article examines the strategies used by professional translators to translate resultatives into Romanian, and the resulting syntactic patterns, shown to be dependent on the type of resultative translated (fake/true). It demonstrates that the mostly compensatory techniques generate structures which, overall, reflect Talmy's  lexicalization patterns for Romance and support the uniform treatment of GM and resultatives crosslinguistically.
It also argues that the higher syntactic/semantic variation of resultatives (vs. GM) is responsible for the higher number of strategies and patterns translating them. 

Author Biography

  • RUXANDRA DRĂGAN, University of Bucharest

    Ruxandra Drăgan is Associate Professor in the English Department, University of Bucharest and a Fulbright scholar with a fellowship at the University of Connecticut. Her doctoral thesis, Aspects of Lexical Structure: Verbs in Locative Constructions in English and Romanian, was published by Bucharest University Press in 2012. In 2016 she also published Modern Approaches to the Derivation of English Resultative Constructions (Printech Publishing House). Her theoretical research focuses on the linguistic representation of change of location/state structures at word level (denominal/deadjectival verbs) and sentence level (resultative and Goal of Motion constructions) in English and Romanian. She is currently conducting research in the field of translation studies, focusing on the translation of Goal of Motion and resultative constructions into Romanian and other Romance languages

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Published

2024-09-30