Tertia comparationis in multilingual corpora 11
communication). In the case of three of the five novels in the corpus, the French
translation was published just one or two years before the English one. The two
novels translated first into English were both subsequently translated into French
by Eric Eydoux, who is bilingual in Norwegian and French, an author in his own
right and the translator of over 30 books from Norwegian into French. There is
no reason to assume that he would have felt the need to look at an earlier English
translation. Nor is there any obvious text-internal evidence of influence from one
translation on another. Were one to come across examples of similar mistransla-
tions of the same passage into both languages, for instance, this would give rise to
suspicion of consulting another translation on the part of the translator. However,
I have not come across this type of evidence.
The theoretical point that should be raised concerns the possibility that trans-
lation effects may skew the results of the comparison. There is no doubt that
translated texts may differ in some respects from original texts. Indeed, Capelle
(2011), in a comparison of translations of predications of motion into English
from French and German, demonstrates that it is possible to predict the language
of the original text on the basis of the translations. However, in the present study,
translations are being compared to other translations. There is no a priori reason
to expect to find more tokens displaying translation effects in one language than
the other. In the end, all one can do is bear this possibility in mind, and take care
not to draw conclusions on the basis of tokens that seem unidiomatic.
- The semantic field of ‘betweenness’
We can divide the concept of ‘betweenness’ into seven main senses.^2 They will
be illustrated in turn by means of English tokens from the ENPC. To begin
with spatial tokens, often taken to comprise the central sense (see, for instance,
Lindstromberg 2010: 89) these may be distinguished according to whether they
code the locus of situation of the trajector (Location), as in (8), or whether they
code a section of a path in a predication of movement (Motion), as in (9).
(8) There were thick bushes and low trees between the houses. (BO1)
(9) They passed through the gap, between stone posts with ogee tops. (RR1)
Two senses which may be understood as extended from the spatial senses contain
a directional element in their semantic make-up. These are the Scale and Time
senses, illustrated by (10) and (11), respectively.
- Egan (in press) contains a thorough description of each of these.