Investigating functional sentence perspective in German-English professional and student translations

This paper describes an empirical corpus analysis of English translation strategies for German non-SVO sentence beginnings in two small corpora, one of which is a corpus of 5 professional translations, the other a smaller corpus of 5 texts with 4 student versions for each text.

For the analysis, two related but distinct methods of analysis were selected, one based on Rogers (2006), who investigated whether pragmatic word order or grammatical word order is given preference in English translations of German non-SVO sentences. The other is based on Firbas’s (1992) concept of functional sentence perspective as elaborated and operationalized by Doherty (1991, 2002), in order to determine whether communicative dynamism (CD) has been preserved in English translations.

The analysis shows that professional translators achieve pragmatic word order in between 60–70% of cases, and maintain CD in an even higher percentage of cases (80–100%). Student translators, who are further differentiated as to English native speakers (EN), German native speakers (GN) or non-native speakers of either language (NN), vary more widely. GNs tend to achieve more pragmatic word order translations than ENs and even higher CD preservation, but there is also greater variety between different ENs. On average, functional sentence perspective is less well preserved overall in student translations than in professional translations.