The English -ing Participial Free Adjunct in Original and Translated Fiction : an English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus Study

The English -ing participial free adjunct is a type of subclause as shown here: (1) Chewing her gum steadily, the girl handed him a printed form and a pencil. (2) Hartmann, waiting for the bill, frowned. (3) “One strong Scotch for the Reverend Professor,” said Arthur, moving to prepare it. It is a well-known fact that these types of clauses may signal various logical relations with their superordinate clauses, such as Time and Cause, and that it is often difficult to identify exactly what the relation is. Another fairly well-known fact is that these clauses offer challenges when translating into Norwegian, as Norwegian does not have a fully parallel construction. Most often, the Norwegian translation will be a full sentence, a coordinated main clause, or a conjunction-headed subclause, but there are other options as well. What these Norwegian renderings have in common, however, is that they have direct counterparts in English. As the title suggests, this paper compares and contrasts original English fiction with fiction that has been translated from Norwegian. Quite profound differences emerge. Briefly, the findings can be summarized thus: i) Translated English show much fewer instances of -ing adjuncts, especially in initial ad medial position (examples 1 and 2 above) ii) Original English -ing adjuncts cover a wider range of meaning relations iii) Original English -ing adjuncts seem to have a more distinct function in the creation of discourse. Possible explanations are offered for these differences. The most apparent one seems to be that translators generally opt for direct counterparts. The result is that original and translated English differ in a number of ways