Substitution as a device of grammatical cohesion in english narrative and its translation into spanish

Jornades de Foment de la Investigació SUBSTITUTION AS A DEVICE OF GRAMMATICAL COHESION IN ENGLISH NARRATIVE AND ITS TRANSLATION INTO SPANISH Autors Mercedes QUEROL. Substitution as a device of grammatical cohesion in english narrative and its translation into spanish 2 ABSTRACT This paper presents a description of how English literature makes use of substitution as a device of grammatical cohesion and the mechanisms employed in its translation into Spanish. Three literary works were examined with this aim, carrying out a quantitative and a qualitative analysis of them. The main results suggest that the Spanish solution to this cohesive device is not unique and other mechanisms different from substitution are employed. This confirms previous research showing that each language has its own cohesive devices and employs them following the internal rules of the language. 1. INTRODUCTION Cohesion is one of the aspects that is taken into consideration in the textual analysis of translations. Baker (1992) includes cohesion in the study of textual equivalence defining it as «the network of lexical, grammatical, and other relations which provide links between various parts of a text»·. Halliday and Hasan (1976) make a detailed classification of the cohesive devices in English. These authors distinguish between grammatical and lexical cohesion. According to them, grammatical cohesion embraces four different devices: a) reference: this mechanism relates one element of the text to another one for its interpretation, which can be present or not (endophoric and exophoric reference). Reference is a semantic relation. In the following example, they refers to children. (1) All children, except one, grow up. They soon know that they will grow up, and the way Wendy knew was this. b) substitution: «the replacement of one item by another» For example, in (2) The Lion was about to reply when suddenly they came to another gulf across the road. But this one was so broad and deep that the Lion knew at once he could not leap across it. one substitutes for gulf. c) ellipsis: «the omission of an item» In this example, Dormouses is elided after two. (3) There was a table set out under a tree in front of the house, and the March Hare and the Hatter were having tea at it: a Dormouse was sitting between them, fast asleep, and the other two were using it as a cushion, resting their elbows on it, and talking over its head. The fourth type of grammatical cohesive relation is d) conjunction: particular expressions contribute to create discursive connections. For example, in (4) There were no children there, and it was night time; but he addressed all who might be dreaming of the Neverland, and who were therefore nearer to him than you think and originates an additive conjunctive relation, but does an adversative one and therefore a causal. Substitution as a device of grammatical cohesion in english narrative and its translation into spanish 3 The identification of these mechanisms is not always completely clear and sometimes more than one device can be attributed to a single linguistic situation. On the other hand, lexical cohesion is achieved by «the selection of vocabulary» For example in (5) At last she crawled over the swaying floor to her bed, and lay down upon it; and Toto followed and lay down beside her. lay down is repeated. Regarding Spanish, Mederos (1988) also provides a complete taxonomy. The two classifications present some differences both in the terminology employed and in the criteria of classification itself. However, they share a common understanding of how the mechanisms of cohesion work. The present analysis was performed following the classification proposed by Halliday and Hasan. Additionally, Mederos has also been consulted for some particular tricky examples. Previous research papers have been published in relation to textual cohesion and translation. However, none of them to our knowledge showed the combination of the three main features that characterise the present research. Firstly, the study was based on the contrastive analysis of two parallel corpora: the original texts in English and their translations into Spanish. Secondly, the literary genre of the adventure fiction was examined. There are many studies based on literature, and even specifically about this genre (Franco, 1997:33-44), however only a few make use of literature as a corpus for linguistic research. And finally, the present study provides a close analysis of a particular grammatical cohesive device employed in English and its equivalence in the Spanish translation. The aim of this research was to study from a quantitative and a qualitative point of view the possible shifts of cohesion in translation in a particular text type. 2. METHOD As I have mentioned before, two literary corpora were used for the present research. They were identified as Corpus A and Corpus B. The former was composed of the original texts written in English and it was made up of 113,455 words. The latter included the translations into Spanish of those very same texts and it consisted of 114,164 words. Both corpora have a digital format and are available on the Internet. Corpus A belongs to the Project Gutenberg’s collection of electronic books. Three literary works have constituted the sample of the study: Peter Pan (hereafter PP) by James Matthew Barrie (1991), The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (hereafter WWO) by Lyman Frank Baum (1993) and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (hereafter AAW) by Lewis Carroll (1997). All of them have a common feature: that of being classified as children’s literature. Corpus B was obtained from a collection called LIBRO dot. com. Detailed information about the translations was not available. The study was conducted following three steps: 1. Identification in Corpus A of the substitution devices employed in English. Halliday and Hasan distinguish three types of substitution: nominal, verbal, and clausal. The list of items that can occur as substitutes is very limited: Substitution as a device of grammatical cohesion in english narrative and its translation into spanish 4 one, ones; same (nominal) (6) Last come the Twins, who cannot be described because we should be sure to be describing the wrong one (PP) one substitutes for twin do and its variations (verbal) (7) ‘If you knew Time as well as I do,’ said the Hatter, ‘you wouldn’t talk about wasting it. It’s him. (AAW) do substitutes for know so, not (clausal) (8) “Have you brains?” asked the Scarecrow. “I suppose so. I’ve never looked to see,” replied the Lion. (WO) so substitutes for I have brains The identification of such items was carried out with the help of a concordance programme, Concapp. 2. Immediately after this selection, the parallel linguistic expressions were located in Corpus B. 3. Finally, the solutions adopted in the Spanish translations were analysed. 3. RESULTS 3.1. ENGLISH SUBSTITUTION DEVICES The analysis of Corpus A, regarding the items employed as substitution devices in English, produced the results reproduced in Table 1. 125 cases of substitution were located in the texts, which represented 1 per 1,000 of the words of the corpus. In relation to the three different types of substitution identified, nominal and verbal substitutions had a similar frequency, whereas there was a lower employment of the clausal type. As regards the cohesive items, one was the most common one in nominal substitution, however, do was the most widely employed in general. Notice that so, which has been presented as a particle of clausal substitution, appeared twice as a nominal type (a possibility which was also pointed out by Halliday and Hasan). Table 1 Occurrences and frequency of cohesive items of substitution in Corpus A Ítems Occurrences Frequency (per 1000 words) Nominal Substitution One 26 0,23 Ones 16 0,14 Same 3 0,03 So 2 0,02 Total 47 0,42 Verbal Substitution do 48 0,42 Clausal Substitution So 18 0,16 not 12 0,11 Total 30 0,27 Substitution as a device of grammatical cohesion in english narrative and its translation into spanish 5 3.2. SPANISH SOLUTIONS TO THE ENGLISH SUBSTITUTION DEVICES After the analysis of the types of substitution in the English texts and the frequency of the items employed to develop them, we studied the equivalent solutions adopted in the Spanish translations (Corpus B). Table 2 illustrates the findings. It is important to point out that we have not taken into consideration the three different types of substitution in the original texts. Therefore, the results have to be understood as the Spanish solutions to the English substitution device in general. Table 2 Occurrence and frequency of Spanish solutions to the English substitution device Occurrence Frequency (per 1000 words) A. Cohesive devices Grammatical Cohesion Substitution 24 0.21 Ellipsis 64 0.56 Reference 9 0.08 Total 97 0.85 Lexical Cohesion Synonyms (or near synonyms) 3 0.03 Same word (repetition) 3 0.03 Total 6 0.06 Grammatical and Lexical Cohesion Synonyms (or near synonyms) and Reference 1 0.01 Same word (repetition) and Ellipsis 1 0.01 Same word (repetition) and Reference 5 0.05 Total 7 0.07 B. Translation Techniques Reduction (omission) 5 0.04 Reformulation 9 0.08 Others 1 0.01 Total 15 0.13 Two different solutions were adopted for the translation of the English texts for the cases of substitution: the employment of cohesive devices and the use of translation techniques. As the results showed, the former option was much more common than the latter one, in particular grammatical cohesion. Three different types of cohesive devices were identified: grammatical, lexical and a combination of both. When selecting the cohesive device, substitution has not always been the alternative. Furthermore, only 24 cases of substitution were identified in the Spanish translations whereas in the rest of the cases, 101, another solution was adopted. A close analysis of those mechanisms employed in the translation is depicted as follows. Substitution as a device of grammatical cohesion in english narrative and its translation into spanish 6 3.2.1. COHESIVE DEVICES 3.2.1.1. Grammatical cohesion devices The results yielded statistically significant differences between the grammatical cohesion devices. A. Ellipsis Ellipsis was the most frequent cohesion device, with 64 cases out of 97. Halliday and Hasan also distinguish among nominal, verbal and clausal ellipsis, being nominal (see example 9) and clausal (10) the most common ones –with 31 and 29 cases. Verbal ellipsis (11) only presented 4 cases. (9) Había varios caminos en las cercanías, pero no tardó mucho en hallar el Ø que estaba pavimentado con ladrillos amarillos. There were several roads near by, but it did not take her long to find the one paved with yellow bricks. (WWO) (10) -. ¡Estoy seguro de que ni siquiera has hablado nunca con el Tiempo! --Creo que no Ø --respondió Alicia con cautela--. Pero en la clase de música tengo que marcar el tiempo con palmadas. ‘Of course you don’t!’ the Hatter said, tossing his head contemptuously. ‘I dare say you never even spoke to Time!’ ‘Perhaps not,’ Alice cautiously replied: ‘but I know I have to beat time when I learn music.’ (AAW) (11) -Pero -dijo John, como quien ha perdido fe en su memoria-, él no dormía en la perrera, ¿verdad? -John -dijo Wendy con voz entrecortada-, quizás no recordamos nuestra antigua vida tan bien como creíamos Ø. “Surely,” said John, like one who had lost faith in his memory, “he used not to sleep in the kennel?” “John,” Wendy said falteringly, “perhaps we don’t remember the old life as well as we thought we did.” (PP) B. Substitution Substitution was the second most popular grammatical cohesive device in these translations. There were three particular items employed for this aim which have their equivalents in English: lo mismo / igual, the same (see example 12), hacer + lo, do (13) and así, so (14). Verbal substitution was the most frequent with 14 out of 24 cases. The other 10 instances were equally distributed between nominal and clausal types. (12) -Hacia Oriente, no muy lejos de aquí -dijo uno-, está el gran desierto que nadie puede cruzar. -Lo mismo que en el Sur -declaró otro-, pues yo he estado allí y lo he visto. El Sur es el país de los Quadlings. -Y a mí me han dicho que en el Occidente es lo mismo -expresó el tercero-. “At the East, not far from here,” said one, “there is a great desert, and none could live to cross it.” “It is the same at the South,” said another, “for I have been there and seen it. The South is the country of the Quadlings.” “I am told,” said the third man, “that it is the same at the West. (WWO) Substitution as a device of grammatical cohesion in english narrative and its translation into spanish 7 (13) --No sabía que los gatos de Cheshire estuvieran siempre sonriendo. En realidad, ni siquiera sabía que los gatos pudieran sonreír. --Todos pueden --dijo la Duquesa--, y muchos lo hacen. --No sabía de ninguno que lo hiciera --dijo Alicia muy amablemente, contenta de haber iniciado una conversación. ‘I didn’t know that Cheshire cats always grinned; in fact, I didn’t know that cats could grin.’ ‘They all can,’ said the Duchess; ‘and most of ‘em do.’ ‘I don’t know of any that do,’ Alice said very politely, feeling quite pleased to have got into a conversation. (AAW) (14) -¿Cree que seríamos demasiados, señor? Porque si es así nos podemos ir. “Do you think we should be too much of a handful, sir? Because, if so, we can go away.” (PP) The following example illustrates the use of so and its Spanish equivalent in a nominal substitution. (15) ¡Decirle al pobre Smee que lo encontraban simpático! Garfio ardía en deseos de decírselo, pero le parecía demasiado brutal. En cambio, dio vueltas en la cabeza a este misterio: ¿por qué encuentran simpático a Smee? Rastreó el problema como el sabueso que era. Si Smee era simpático, ¿qué era lo que le hacía ser así? To tell poor Smee that they thought him lovable! Hook itched to do it, but it seemed too brutal. Instead, he revolved this mystery in his mind: why do they find Smee lovable? He pursued the problem like the sleuth-hound that he was. If Smee was lovable, what was it that made him so? (PP) C. Reference The use of reference inside the grammatical cohesion devices was not widespread in Corpus B. Personal (16) and demonstrative (17) were the two types of referential cohesion identified in this analysis and both of them had a similar distribution. (16) --Con perdón --dijo el Ratón, frunciendo el ceño, pero con mucha cortesía--. ¿Decía usted algo? --¡Yo no! --se apresuró a responder el Loro. --Pues me lo había parecido -dijo el Ratón--. ‘I beg your pardon!’ said the Mouse, frowning, but very politely: ‘Did you speak?’ ‘Not I!’ said the Lory hastily. ‘I thought you did,’ said the Mouse. (AAW) (17) -Wendy -siguió él con una voz a la que ninguna mujer ha podido todavía resistirse-, Wendy, una chica vale más que veinte chicos. Wendy era una mujer por los cuatro costados, aunque no fueran costados muy grandes y atisbó fuera de las mantas. -¿De verdad crees eso, Peter? “Wendy,” he continued, in a voice that no woman has ever yet been able to resist, “Wendy, one girl is more use than twenty boys.” Now Wendy was every inch a woman, though there were not very many inches, and she peeped out of the bed-clothes. “Do you really think so, Peter?” (PP) Substitution as a device of grammatical cohesion in english narrative and its translation into spanish 8 3.2.1.2. Lexical cohesion devices In relation to lexical cohesion, Halliday and Hasan distinguish between reiteration and collocation. The sample studied only provided us with examples of two types of reiteration: same word (repetition) (18) and synonym (or near synonym) (19). (18) Había llegado el momento de comerse los confites, lo que provocó bastante ruido y confusión, pues los pájaros grandes se quejaban de que sabían a poco, y los pájaros pequeños se atragantaban y había que darles palmaditas en la espalda. The next thing was to eat the comfits: this caused some noise and confusion, as the large birds complained that they could not taste theirs, and the small ones choked and had to be patted on the back. (AAW) (19) Pues se encontraba sentada en medio de la extensa llanura de Kansas, y frente a ella veíase la nueva casa que el tío Henry había construido después que el ciclón se llevó la otra vivienda. For she was sitting on the broad Kansas prairie, and just before her was the new farmhouse Uncle Henry built after the cyclone had carried away the old one. (WWO) 3.2.1.1. Grammatical and lexical cohesion devices The last option in the Spanish translation included in the cohesive devices was that in which the translator had combined both grammatical and lexical cohesion in order to solve a case of substitution in the source language. 5 out of the 7 examples which presented this device combined the following mechanism: same word (lexical cohesion) and reference (grammatical cohesion). In example 20, substitution in the English text was done by the replacement of the whole verbal group live in Kensington Gardens. However, in the Spanish translation the lexical cohesion worked with the repetition of the verb vivir and the reference to the rest of the verbal group by means of the demonstrative adverb allí. (20) -Si ahora ya no vives en los jardines de Kensington... -Todavía vivo allí a veces. “If you don’t live in Kensington Gardens now –” “Sometimes I do still.” (PP) 3.2.2. Translation Techniques As mentioned before, some translation techniques were also used in Corpus B, namely those of reduction and reformulation. The latter has been the most popular in the selected corpus. Reduction is also called omission and it refers to the situation where a part of the source text is omitted. In our study, the affected part was the one where a substitution item was included. On the other hand, reformulation can be understood as the omission of the cohesive device. An illustrative example of reduction can be seen in example 21, where the second qualifier of deed, brave, was omitted in the translation. Example 22 shows the reformulation technique. (21) -Por lo tanto, al salvarme la vida has hecho algo muy importante -añadió la Reina. “Therefore you have done a great deed, as well as a brave one, in saving my life,” added the Queen. (WWO) Substitution as a device of grammatical cohesion in english narrative and its translation into spanish 9 (22) La mesa era muy grande, pero los tres se apretujaban muy juntos en uno de los extremos. The table was a large one, but the three were all crowded together at one corner of it (AAW) Finally, it is also interesting to mention the case of a different translation technique, as in the following example. (23) Cuando su cabeza sobrepasó la parte superior de la pared, el hombre de paja exclamó: -¡Cielos! Siguió subiendo y se sentó en lo alto del muro, mientras que Dorothy ascendía tras él y exclamaba también: -¡Cielos! When he got his head over the top of the wall the Scarecrow said, “Oh, my!” “Go on,” exclaimed Dorothy. So the Scarecrow climbed farther up and sat down on the top of the wall, and Dorothy put her head over and cried, “Oh, my!” just as the Scarecrow had done. (WWO) In this case, we can say that the Spanish term también has been chosen because it includes the implicit idea expressed in the original English text. 4. CONCLUSIONS This study analysed the use of substitution in English literature and in its translation into Spanish. The results showed that nominal and verbal substitutions were the most common types in English. The Spanish translation of this mechanism was normally another grammatical device. However, it was not substitution but ellipsis the most widely employed. For Halliday and Hasan (1976:143) substitution and ellipsis have a common ground, presupposition. In substitution, presupposition is explicit, there is an «explicit counter», whereas in ellipsis nothing is inserted in the slot that it leaves. They add that ellipsis can be regarded as substitution by zero. We can establish a connection between this definition and the conclusions obtained by Blum-Kulka (2000:299-302). She states that the shift in cohesion affects the translations in one or both of the following aspects: in level of explicitness or/and in text meaning. It is in the latter aspect that we find the mentioned relationship. This author refers to the shifts in text meaning as: «the explicit and implicit meaning potential of the source text changes through translations» and she follows «The choice involved in the types of cohesive markers used in a particular text can affect the texture (as being “loose” or “dense”) as well as the style and meaning of that text» According to this theory, the major use of ellipsis, as an equivalent to the English substitutive item, changes the texture of the Spanish translation, that makes it looser than the original, at least in those particular parts of the text. The reason for the results we have achieved in this study can be found in the different nature of these two languages, English is more rigid than Spanish. We consider two important aspects that distinguish both languages and that condition them. On the one hand, English requirement of the presence of subject in all sentences, on the other, lack of gender markers in nouns and adjectives in this very same language. These inherent features of the language determine the type of coherent devices that the language can employ. The requirement of the subject in English makes the language use mechanisms such as substitution. However, Spanish tends to incorporate the subject in the verbal endings and the