Chapter 3. Grammatical aspects
OF TRANSLATION 3.1. HANDLING EQUIVALENT FORMS AND STRUCTURES
Introductory Notes
Every Word in the text is used in a particular grammatical form and all the words are arranged in sentences in a particular syntactic order. Grammaticality is an important feature of speech units. Grammatical forms and structures, however, do not only provide for the correct arrangement of words in the text, they also convey some information which is part of its total contents. They reveal the semantic relationships between the words, clauses and sentences in the text, they can make prominent some .part of the contents that is of particular significance for the communicants. The syntactic structuring of the text is an important characteristics identifying either the genre of the text or its author's style.
Though the bulk of the information in the original text is conveyed by its lexical elements, the semantic role of grammatical forms and structures
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should not be overlooked by the translator. The importance of the grammatical aspects of the source text is often reflected in the choice of the parallel forms and structures in TL, as in the following example:
The Industrial Revolution brought into being the industrial proletariat and with it the fight for civil and political rights, trade union organization and the right to vote.
Промышленная революция вызвала к жизни промышленный пролетариат и вместе с ним борьбу за гражданские и политические права, тред-юнионы и право голоса.
In many cases, however, equivalence in translation can be best achieved if the translator does not try to mirror the grammatical forms in the source text. There are no permanent grammatical equivalents and the translator can choose between the parallel forms and various grammatical transformations. He may opt for the latter for there is never an absolute identity between the meaning and usage of the parallel forms in SL and TL. For instance, both English and Russian verbs have their infinitive forms. The analogy, however, does not preclude a number of formal and functional differences. We may recall that the English infinitive has perfect forms, both active and passive, indefinite and continuous, which are absent in the respective grammatical category in Russian. The idea of priority or non-performed action expressed by the Perfect Infinitive is not present in the meaning of the Russian Infinitive and has to be rendered in translation by some other means. Cf. 'The train seems to arrive at 5." - Поезд, видимо, приходит в 5. and 'The train seems to have arrived at 5." - Поезд, видимо, пришел в 5.
A dissimilarity of the English and Russian Infinitives can be also found in the functions they perform in the sentence. Note should be taken, for example, of the Continuative Infinitive which in English denotes an action following that indicated by the Predicate:
Parliament was dissolved, not to meet again for eleven years. Парламент был распущен и не созывался в течение 11 лет. Не came home to find his wife gone. Он вернулся домой и обнаружил, что жена ушла.
A similar difference can be observed if one compares the finite forms of the verb in English and in Russian. The English and the Russian verbs both have active and passive forms, but in English the passive forms are more numerous and are more often used. As a result, the meaning of the passive verb in the source text is often rendered by an active verb in the translation:
This port can be entered by big ships only during the tide. Большие корабли могут заходить в этот порт только во время 98
прилива. (The sentence can certainly be translated in some other way, e.g. Этот порт доступен для больших кораблей только во время прилива.)
A most common example of dissimilarity between the parallel syntactic devices in the two languages is the role of the word order in English and in Russian. Both languages use a "direct" and an "inverted" word order. But the English word order obeys, in most cases, the established rule of sequence: the predicate is preceded by the subject and followed by the object. This order of words is often changed in the Russian translation since in Russian the word order is used to show the communicative load of different parts of the sentence, the elements conveying new information (the rheme) leaning towards the end of non-emphatic sentences. Thus if the English sentence "My son entered the room" is intended to inform us who entered the room, its Russian equivalent will be «В комнату вошел мой сын» but in case its purpose is to tell us what my son did, the word order will be preserved: «Мой сын вошел в комнату».
The predominantly fixed word order in the English sentence means that each case of its inversion (placing the object before the subject-predicate sequence) makes the object carry a great communicative load. This emphasis cannot be reproduced in translation by such a common device as the inverted word order in the Russian sentence and the translator has to use some additional words to express the same idea:
Money he had none.
Денег у него не было ни гроша.
The refusal to use a parallel structure in the target text may involve a change in the number of independent sentences by using the partitioning or the integrating procedures described above (see pp. 35-36). Here is another example of such translations:
The two boys flew on and on towards the village speechless with horror.
Мальчики бежали вперед и вперед по направлению к деревне. Они онемели от ужаса.
It should be noted that a parallel form may prove unsuitable because of its different stylistic connotation. For instance, both English and Russian conditional clauses can be introduced by conjunctions or asyndetically. But the English asyndetical form is bookish while its Russian counterpart is predominantly colloquial. As a result, it is usually replaced in the target text by a clause with a conjunction, e.g.:
Had the Security Council adopted the Soviet proposal, it would have
been an important step towards the solution of the problem.
Если бы Совет Безопасности принял советское предложение, это было бы важным шагом к решению проблемы.
The translator usually finds it possible to make a relatively free choice among the possible grammatical arrangements of TT, provided the basic relationships expressed by the SL grammatical categories are intact.
Exercises
I. Translate the following sentences with the special attention to the choice of Russian equivalents to render the meaning of the English infinitives.
1. The people of Roumania lived in a poverty difficult to imagine. 2. The Security Council is given the power to decide when a threat to peace exists without waiting for the war to break out. 3. The general was a good man to keep away from. 4. This is a nice place to live in. 5. He stopped the car for me to buy some cigarettes. 6. Jack London was the best short-story writer in his country to arise after Edgar Рое. 7. In 1577 Drake set out on his voyage round the world, to return with an immense cargo of booty. 8. How different a reception awaited those workers who went to the centre of the city last May Day to be beaten and arrested by mounted policemen when they raised their banners in defence of peace. 9. Katherine had been for a walk by herself one morning, and came back to find Lenox grinning at her expectantly. 10. The Foreign Secretary said they were glad to have made such good progress at the Geneva conference last month.
П. Note the way the meaning of the English passive forms is rendered in your translation of the following sentences.
1. The Prime-Minister was forced to admit in the House of Commons that Britain had rejected the Argentine offer to negotiate the Folklands' crisis. 2. The amendment was rejected by the majority of the Security Council. 3. He rose to speak and was warmly greeted by the audience. 4. The treaty is reported to have been ratified by all participants. 5. The general was preceded into the room by his daughter. 6. It was the late President Roosevelt who told the American people that "more than one-third of the nation is ill-clothed, ill-housed and ill-fed". 7. People must be met, they must be faced, talked to, smiled at. 8. The Foreign Secretary was questioned in the House of Commons about the attitude of the British Government to the sentences on Nazi war criminals. 9. When our business was attended to, our bags packed, and our families taken leave of, we started from Victoria Station.
III. Select the appropriate word order in the Russian translations of the following sentences.
1. Great strikes raged in steel, meat-packing, lumber, railroad, textiles, building, marine transport, coal, printing, garment-making — wherever there were trade unions. 2. The United States government refused to recognize the Soviet government until 1933; sixteen years after the revolution. 3. It was primarily because of these concessions to Negro and white labor that big capital came to hate Roosevelt so ruthlessly. 4. The Dutch Navy rescued the crew of a British freighter which began to sink near the Dutch coast after loose cargo shifted, a Navy spokesman said. 5. More than 500 senior British scientists from 20 universities have signed a pledge boycotting research for the American Strategic Defence Initiative, popularly known as Star Wars. 6. Japan may seem a rich country from abroad, but most Japanese still feel that basic living standards are below international par. 7. Floating on waves thousands of miles from any city, deposited on mountains and remote beaches, plastic trash is one of the most annoying of modern artifacts. 8. The position of a black hole at the centre of our galaxy, the Milky Way, has been identified by measurements that can be made only once every 19 or so years. 9. Sugar consumption was predictably down again, by 7.5 per cent, but the traditional habit of tea drinking recovered slightly.
IV. Employ the panitioning and integrating procedures to translate the following sentences
into Russian.
1. The United States reactionaries likewise cynically sabotaged cooperation with the USSR during World War II, in the hope that Hitler's forces would so butcher the Red Army as to make it virtually powerless after the war. 2. More than 2,600 local farmers, radical leftists and others rallied to protest against the planned expansion of Tokyo's international airport at Narita, but 10,000 riot police kept them away from the airport. 3. Typhoon Peggy cast a destructive path across the northern Philippines recently, killing more than 40 people, flooding huge areas and leaving behind a wide trail of wrecked houses, crops and building before heading towards south-east China. 4. Dr. Weinberg, the senior member of the research team that identified and cloned the gene, is one of the pioneers in the study of cancer genes. They are known to scientists as oncogenes, and they contribute to cancer development when they are abnormal or abnormally activated. 5. Italian magistrates have issued warrants for the arrest of 40 people over a huge fruit and vegetable racket they say has defrauded the EEC of up to 33 billion lire. 6. The blood-sucking leech, which fell out of medical favor a century ago after a career that predated the Christian era, is back in the science laboratories as a result of research
indicating it may have a role in treating tumors and other conditions. 7. House prices increased by 4 per cent in the third quarter of the year, the same rise as in the previous quarter, and giving an annual increase of 12 per cent to the end of September, according to the latest house price survey by the Nationwide Building Society.