Stylistic normalisation, convergence and cross-linguistic interference in translation : The case of the Czech transgressive
Abstract
The Czech transgressive is a non-finite verb form belonging to the cross-linguistic converb category. In contrast with other converbs (e.g.
Romance gerundio or the Russian deepričastie), the Czech transgressive has a strong stylistic mark and is very rare in contemporary language. Using a parallel (multilingual) corpus and a comparable corpus of translated and non-translated Czech, the paper investigates the differences in the frequency of the transgressive in translated and nontranslated fiction and non-fiction.
The data shows the effect of stylistic normalisation in fiction, but not in non-fiction. The results of the potential effect of crosslinguistic interference are less conclusive, indicating that a thorough contrastive analysis of different language pairs is required first.
Finally, the effect of convergence was observed neither in fiction nor in non-fiction.