Why change the subject?

Abstract

This paper reports on a study of syntactic changes in alternative translations of a short story and a scientific article, each translated by a group of ten professional translators. The subject is kept in approximately nine cases out of ten, with a somewhat higher degree of change in the scientific article. Where changes occur, they can very often be traced to differences between the languages on the lexical or syntactic level, but absolute differences signalled by identical behaviour of a whole translator group are as good as non-existent. After more features have been studied, it may be possible to identify profiles for the individual translators—and the two translator groups—showing to what extent their choices are guided by adequacy in relation to the source text vs. acceptability in relation to the target language.