How does a language do without definite articles? evidence from swedish-lithuanian translations

The object of the thesis is compensation of definite articles in Lithuanian based on translations from Swedish. Swedish has grammaticalized markers to express definiteness – definite articles – but the category of definiteness is not grammaticalized in Lithuanian (with the exception of the possibility to express definiteness by using the definite form of the adjective), which raises a question what kind of translation strategies are used in order to translate definite noun phrases from Swedish to Lithuanian. The translation strategy which is analyzed in this thesis is compensation strategy which is used when certain elements must be added in the translation text in order to convey semantic definiteness of the noun phrase. The aim of this thesis is to find out how the lack of definite articles is compensated in translations from Swedish to Lithuanian. To achieve the aim, I have compared four Swedish books to their translations in Lithuanian and collected the cases in which the translator chose to add a word which was not in the original text in order to properly convey the semantic meaning of the phrase. The results showed that the usual means of addition, as a compensation method, are demonstrative pronouns, possessive pronouns and possessive nouns but other elements such as quantifiers, participles, adjectives and other parts of speech can be added in the translation text as well. It is also important to emphasize that the choice of the added word is highly dependent on the type of definiteness, context and the semantic meaning of the translated sentence