Epistemic force in contrast and translation: The case of sans doute and it’s translations in Swedish

This paper deals with adverbs of high probability in French and Swedish from a contrastive and translation perspective. The aim is twofold: firstly to account for important similarities and divergencies in the semantics of the most common epistemic adverbs in the two languages, secondly to shed light on source text influence in the translations. The starting point of the translation analysis will be the most frequent French adverb of high probability, sans doute (’without + doubt ’ no doubt)1 and its translation equivalents in Swedish target as well as source texts. The translation paradigm will be analysed in order to see if there are significant differences in the use of epistemic adverbs in source texts compared to translations, but the translations also contributes with valuable data to further refine the contrastive analysis. Of special interest will be the epistemic force value, the degree of probability. The question is to determine whether the force value is maintained in the translation and to what extent it can be used to account for variations in the translation paradigm. On a general level, Swedish differs from French in that it has a wider range of probability adverbs having roughly the same position on the epistemic scale but being different with regard to other factors as (inter)subjectivity. In fact, in spite of several surface similarities and common structural features, closely related epistemic adverbs might vary considerably intra- and inter-linguistically in meaning, use and discourse function. That is why typological (Palmer 1986, 2001) and paradigmatic Nuyts (2001