36 Åke Viberg
major types of translations shown in Table 2, there are various other types of
translations referred to as Other. For exemple, in French, where the number of
such translations is greatest, there are 11 examples with a support verb combined
with a noun or prepositional phrase (e.g. faire un tour ‘make a trip’, prendre le bus
‘take the bus’ and être en route ‘be on (one’s) way’), a few nominalized clauses (e.g.
au moment de son depart < när han åkte ‘when he went’), some examples of direc-
tional verbs used only once (e.g. entrer, monter, traverser) and a few other minor
categories. In addition, there are 14 free translations.
There is a full set of translations of all the Swedish texts only into the languages
listed in Table 2. In spite of that, it is possible to observe interesting examples of
variable translations also into Dutch and into Norwegian and Danish which are
represented in Example (5). The translations of Swedish åka were studied in the
part of the Dutch-Swedish Parallel Corpus (Rawoens 2010) based on Swedish
originals, which is available from The Swedish Language Bank. The first 200 occur-
rences of the verb were coded and out of these, there were 179 occurrences of åka
used as a vehicle verb. It turned out that the most frequent translation was gaan
‘go’ which was used as a translation 69 times, whereas rijden was used 53 times.
In spite of the fact that the number of translations into Norwegian and Danish are
restricted in the MPC corpus, it is possible to observe an interesting alternation
even in these two languages which are very closely related to Swedish (see 6).
(6) Swedish För något år sedan åkte jag ned till Polen i ett helt annat
ärende. (SL)
English A few years ago I went down to Poland on some other matter.
Norwegian For et års tid siden dro jeg ned til Polen i et helt annet ærend.
Danish For et års tid siden tog jeg ned til Polen i et helt andet ærinde.
Icelandic Fyrir nokkrum árum fór ég svo til Póllands í allt öðrum
erindagjörðum.
Even if both Norwegian and Danish are similar to Swedish with respect to the
verb gå, which is not used as a general motion verb in the same way as English
go, there is a frequent alternative to k(j)øre as a translation of åka that is not a
vehicle verb. In Norwegian, the verb dra, which basically means ‘pull’, a kind of
object-centered motion, is frequently used to describe subject-centered motion.
In Danish, tage ‘take’ can also be used as a subject-centered motion verb and is a
frequent alternative to køre as a translation of åka. Both of these uses have partial
parallels in Swedish, even if the development has not gone as far as in Norwegian
and Danish (respectively). Swedish dra ‘pull, draw’ can be used to refer to subject-
centered motion (Viberg 1996) but this use appears to be much more frequent in
Norwegian. The Swedish verb ta ‘take’ can be used as a subject-centered motion
verb but only in reflexive form (ta sig), and even if ta sig in this use is not clearly