Asymmetric syntactic patterns in German-Dutch translation : a corpus-based study of the interaction between normalisation and shining through

The present study investigates how opposing translation universals (explanatory devices) as normalisation and shining through interact with each other. More particularly, we want to find out whether it is more likely to observe instantiations of shining through or (over-)normalisation in translations of contemporary literary fiction and whether the likelihood of these three explanatory devices varies according to translation direction. On the basis of a bidirectional comparable corpus of Dutch and German literary fictional texts (1975-2010), we investigated a case of syntactic variation that exists in both languages, viz. prepositional phrase (PP) placement. In both languages, a PP can be placed either in the middle field or in the postfield, but German presents a more outspoken preference for the middle field, thus making PP placement ideal for an investigation of the interaction between shining through and (over)normalisation. The results of the analyses show that (i) there is a strong form of shining through present in Dutch texts translated from German and (ii) a strong form of normalisation in German texts translated from Dutch. These results confirm Toury’s hypothesis that a less prestigious language such as Dutch is more tolerant towards higher frequencies of linguistic features which are typical of highly prestigious source languages as German than the other way around