192 Jarle Ebeling, Signe Oksefjell Ebeling and Hilde Hasselgård
Norwegian likevel/allikevel occurs 256 times in the original texts; the top six
correspondences in the English translations are: Ø (37), anyway (32), all the same
(30), still (26), nevertheless (26), and yet (25), together accounting for almost 70%
of the correspondences.^22 The remaining 30% correspond to 20 different lexical
items/units, in addition to the “rewritten” category, where the meaning of likevel/
allikevel is retained, but is not identifiable as a lexical unit.
It is interesting to note that in translation from Norwegian into English, likevel
is commonly left untranslated and zero correspondence is the most frequent trans-
lation category, e.g. Example (24), even though English has several possible can-
didates for rendering likevel.
(24) “Neida, men jeg vil likevel hjem til henne så fort som mulig.” (EG1)
“No, but I want to get back to her as soon as I can.” (EG1T)
While all the way was seen to be the main correspondence of locational helt/heilt,
the picture is slightly different for all the same, as it is shown to be one of several
relatively frequent translations of likevel. Although all the same may not syntacti-
cally fit into all sentences where likevel has been used, semantically it seems to be
very close.^23 However, different syntactic environments, including position in the
clause, may trigger different translations in the English version.
The case-studies of all the way and all the same have revealed that both can
be said to be meaningful units, but with different degrees of opaqueness. Cross-
linguistically, differences in lexicalization between English and Norwegian have
been uncovered, e.g. all the same and all the way typically correspond to a single
word in Norwegian. There is also some evidence of translation effects, as suggested
by the slight overuse of hele veien in Norwegian translations which seems to be
triggered by the cognate expression all the way. Finally, this small case study has
also revealed that prepositional complementation seems to play an important role.
In Norwegian helt needs PP complementation to acquire a locational reading,
while in English, all the way in the meaning of location-direction/distance may
possibly be said to belong to a four-word combination consisting of all the way +- Of these, all the same is the least frequent in the original texts; still (398), yet (156), anyway
(96), nevertheless (19), all the same (13). It should, of course, be noted that still and yet in par-
ticular have functions and meanings, including a temporal one, that do not overlap with those
of all the same. - See Fretheim and Johansson (2002) for a more detailed cross-linguistic study of the conces-
sive marker likevel, where they focus on the English correspondences after all and anyway, in
particular.