Translating French participles and noun phrases into Swedish : A study of grammatical changes based on a translation of a French medical text into Swedish

The present study is a constrative study of a French medical non-fiction text translated into Swedish. The aim of this study is to examine how French participle and noun phrases are translated into Swedish and thus how the two languages differ from each other. After having translated a French medical non-fiction text into Swedish, we have completed an analysis based on previous studies of Olof Eriksson and the translation theory of Vinay & Darbelnet. We have chosen to divid our analyses into types of transpositions which is a term taken from the translation theory of Vinay & Darbelnet. To be able to discuss alternative translation solutions, we have chosen a qualitative approach for our study. The exempels that we have chosen to discuss in our analysis have mainly been selected based on the frequency of the type of transposition in order to show the most frequent types of transpositions. However, we have found a small number of other types of transpositions that we think are interesting, which is why we have chosen to include them in our analysis. We have to a large extent based our study on Olof Eriksson (1993;1997) and his contrastive studies of Swedish and French. The studies of Eriksson have shown that French participle phrases are the most often translated into a Swedish subjunction. But participle phrases into principal phrases have also shown frequent. Eriksson (1997) note that Swedish prefers a verbal structure and actions are expressed in finite verb formes while the French language tend to use nominal structures. For our study, we have also consulted previous studies conducted by students at post-graduate level. These studies have shown that transpositions where frequent when translating from French to Swedish and that french noun phrases where often subject to change in order to make the noun phrase more verbal in the Swedish target text. In our analysis, we saw that the majority of the participle phrases where translated into Swedish subjunctions. Another frequent type of transposition where French participle phrases translated into Swedish principle clauses. In our study we have also chosen to include the gerund phrases into our analysis. However, we have only found two exemples of gerund in the source texte. But these two exemples have been translated into two different structures in the target text. Regarding the noun phrases, a common type of transposition was a French noun phrase into a Swedish subjunction that starts with the Swedish adverbe “hur”. In summary, our results in this study have been similar to those in the previous studies. Our conclusion is that the Swedish language is centered around the verb while the French language is more centerd around the noun