Masaryk University

Faculty of Arts

Department of English
and American Studies

English Language and Literature

Katarína Mináriková

Shifts in Non-Literary Translation:

with focus on EU translation
Master’s Diploma Thesis

Supervisor: Mgr. Renata Kamenická, Ph. D.

2011
 I declare that I have worked on this thesis independently,
using only the primary and secondary sources listed in the bibliography.

……………………………………………..
Author’s signature

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 Acknowledgement
I would like to express my deep thanks to my supervisor Mgr. Renata Kamenická, Ph. D. for her valuable
advice, her patience and helpfulness and for all the time she sacrificed to read
and correct my drafts.
I would also like to thank my family and friends for their support and patience, and Louel also for his
linguistic advice.

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Table of Contents
INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................ 6

1. Style and shifts.............................................................................................................. 9

1.1. Style and how to study it........................................................................................ 9

1.2. Shifts in Translation............................................................................................. 11

2. Translation in the European Union ............................................................................. 14

2.1. Language policy of the European Union ............................................................. 14

2.2. Problems of EU translation.................................................................................. 15

2.3. EU translation from the perspective of translation studies .................................. 18

3. An Analysis of Style through Shifts in Literary Translation – method proposed by

Hilkka Pekkanen .......................................................................................................... 21

3.1. Objectives of the analysis .................................................................................... 21

3.2. Description of the method.................................................................................... 22

3.3. Findings and evaluation of the method................................................................ 24

4. Methodology ............................................................................................................... 26

4.1. Analysed texts...................................................................................................... 27

4.1.1. EU documents............................................................................................... 28

4.1.2. Non-EU documents....................................................................................... 28

4.2. Application of the method and related problems................................................. 30

4.2.1. Types of translation shifts............................................................................. 32

4.2.2. Definition of units of comparison ................................................................. 32

4.2.3. Differences between the English and the Slovak Language......................... 33

4.3. Illustration of the method..................................................................................... 37

5. Categories of Optional Shifts...................................................................................... 43

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 5.1. Expansion shifts ................................................................................................... 45

5.2. Contraction shifts ................................................................................................. 47

5.3. Shifts in order....................................................................................................... 50

5.4. Miscellaneous shifts............................................................................................. 51

6. Analysis and Its Findings............................................................................................ 54

6.1. General results for respective extracts ................................................................. 54

6.2. Results for respective categories.......................................................................... 61

6.2.1. Expansion shifts ............................................................................................ 61

6.2.2. Contraction shifts .......................................................................................... 64

6.2.3. Shifts in order................................................................................................ 66

6.2.4. Miscellaneous shifts...................................................................................... 67

6.3. Summary of the findings...................................................................................... 68

6.4. Evaluation of the method and its problems.......................................................... 69

CONCLUSION............................................................................................................... 72

Works Cited .................................................................................................................... 75

Primary sources........................................................................................................... 75

Secondary Sources ...................................................................................................... 76

Resumé – English ........................................................................................................... 79

Resumé – Slovak............................................................................................................. 80

Appendix A– CD with all the analysed extracts

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INTRODUCTION

As suggested by its title, Shifts in Non-Literary Translation, the present thesis deals with

the analysis of certain aspects of non-literary translation, namely translation shifts.

Translation shifts are changes introduced to the target text during the translation process,

whether motivated by objective reasons or subjective preferences of the translator. The

method used in this work to study the translation shifts was proposed by a Finnish scholar

Hilkka Pekkanen in order to study the shifts in literary texts.

The purpose for which Pekkanen (2010) created this method was to study the style of

translators of literary works and to find out whether the 'translator's voice' can be heard in

their translations. The details of her research will be presented later in Chapter 3. Since the

analysis yielded satisfactory results in the domain of literary translations, I would like to try

to apply this method on a different kind of texts in order to examine whether it can work

in other domains too. The first objective of this thesis thus is to test the application of

Pekkanen's method on non-literary texts, and with a different target language; but at the

same time the thesis aims to study the patterns of shifting within non-literary translation,

especially in the documents translated within the European Union institutions as compared

with other non-literary texts.

EU translation represents a specific category of non-literary translation. One of its

dominant characteristics is that EU translators should try to be as faithful to the original as

possible, to avoid different understanding of respective documents in their different

language versions. Another thing is that the translations are usually not a product of one

individual translator but of a whole group of translators, revisers and consultants.

Therefore it is impossible to speak of the style of an individual. Nevertheless, due to these

and other specific features (discussed in Chapter 2), which distinguish EU translation from

other kinds of non-literary translation, it is possible that certain consistency might be found

in the style of EU translation as such. To study whether such consistency exists or whether

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each text bears a thumbprint of individual translators, like in the case of literary works, is

thus the second objective of this thesis.

In order to determine whether shifting in EU translation follows some particular

patterns in comparison with other non-literary texts, the third objective is to contrast the

results of the analysis of EU documents with other non-literary texts of similar character.

The differences between the shifts in the two groups of texts, related to their frequency and

categories, should reveal whether there are some patterns that would differentiate EU

translations from other non-literary documents and thus whether something like the 'EU

style' exists.

All the above-mentioned objectives of this thesis are summarised in the following

three research questions:

1) Is it possible to use the translation analysis (proposed by Hilkka Pekkanen)

focusing on shifts in translation in literary texts to analyse non-literary texts?

2) How frequent are the shifts in translation in EU texts which strive to keep as close

to the original as possible? Are there considerable differences in the number of shifts

in different texts that would allow us to speak about a 'translator's thumbprint' or are

there rather patterns common to EU translation in general?

3) Are the shifts in translation in EU texts less frequent or do they follow any

different patterns compared with other non-literary texts of similar character?

Before starting to search for answers to these questions, it is important to look at

some theoretical background connected to these issues. Therefore, the first chapter of the

thesis deals with the concepts of style and shifts in translation. It explains problems related

to the analysis of style, with a special focus on the style of translated texts. It also touches

upon the differences between literary and non-literary texts. Next, it offers a brief overview

of the development of the term 'shift' within translation studies and its categorisation,

which was in a modified form adopted by Pekkanen.

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 The second chapter looks at translation for the European Union institutions. First it

explains the language policy of the EU, based on the principle of multilingualism, and its

impact on EU translation. Then it addresses some of the major problems related to EU

translation and its causes. Finally, it discusses EU translation from the perspective of

translation studies and tries to make a connection between translation theory and EU

practice.

The method of Hilkka Pekkanen is presented in Chapter 3. This chapter starts by

outlining the objectives of Pekkanen's research, which are followed by the description of

the method, including details about the analysed extracts, the process of analysis and

categorisation of results. The outcomes of this method are provided in the last part of the

chapter.

Chapter 4 deals with methodology and problems related to the application of the

method for the purposes of the present thesis. It explains how the extracts for analysis

were selected and how the method was modified and used to study the shifts in these

extracts. It also specifies some details like the categories of shifts and units of comparison

and offers a practical illustration of how the method was applied.

In the fifth chapter respective categories of shifts are examined in more detail,

including examples for each category and subcategory. Certain modifications compared to

Pekkanen's categorisation are explained.

Finally, the sixth chapter provides the findings of the analysis and their interpretation.

The results are first discussed separately for EU and non-EU extracts, then the two groups

are compared. The shifts are subsequently presented by respective categories, where the

attention is paid to differences between their subcategories. In the end the outcomes of this

comparison are summarised and based on them the conclusions are drawn.

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1. Style and shifts

1.1. Style and how to study it

Style is a concept difficult to define and even more difficult to study. As characterised

by Leech and Short in their work Style in Fiction (2007: 9), it "refers to the way in which

language is used in a given context, by a given person, for a given purpose, and so on." In

other words, style depends on choices people make when speaking or writing. It can refer

to units of various sizes – we can speak about style of a particular period, a group of

language users, an individual or even a single text. Although style can characterise spoken

as well as written language, literary as well as academic or 'everyday' language etc., most

often it is associated with literary works, which is also the most common domain for

linguistic research of style. However, the present thesis will try to look at style from a

different perspective. Firstly, it will deal with style of translated texts, where two 'layers' of

style have to be considered – the style of the author of the original text as well as the style

of the translator. Moreover, the analysed texts will be of non-literary character, which

implies that some of their features will be slightly different than in literary texts. These

differences thus raise two questions:

1. How do we study the style of a translated text?

2. What is the difference between the style of literary and non-literary translations?

There is not any universal method how to study or 'measure' style. The majority of

analyses dealing with this problem are based on the hypothesis that there is a relation

between form and content. This hypothesis also became the ground for the method of

Pekkanen (2010: 19), since she defines style as follows: "style is primarily characterized

through formal features of language constituting the linguistic form of a text, choice

between various alternative features and recurrence of certain types of choices in a text".

According to this definition style is based on recurrence of certain features, which means

that it should be possible to study style on the basis of frequencies of certain selected

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features. This conclusion is also supported by Leech & Short (2007: 34), who note that

within analyses of style, "'consistency' and 'tendency' are most naturally reduced to

'frequency', and so, it appears, the stylistician becomes a statistician". However, as they add

later (2007: 56), "the study of style cannot entirely rely on quantitative data", neither can it

be studied really objectively, for several reasons: because there is not any objective way to

determine a statistical norm; because each analysis can deal only with a certain number of

features; because the relation between statistical deviance and its stylistic signification is not

direct; because some significant variations of the style may fail to be captured and finally,

because there is no set of descriptive categories to characterise respective languages,

therefore the approach of respective investigators can differ (Leech & Short 2007: 56-7).

Although linguists are always looking for new approaches to this domain, they still have to

take these complications into account.

It is even more complicated to study the style of a translated text, since, as pointed

out by Boase-Beier in Stylistic Approaches to Translation (2006: 4), "there are the styles of two

texts, the source text and the target text, to take into account". The translated text

supposedly reflects the style of the author of the original as well as how this original was

understood and interpreted by the translator. However, the question raised by Pekkanen

was whether the style of a translator is reflected in the translated text at all, and if it is,

whether there is a way to study it. As pointed out by Mona Baker (2000: 246), who also

studied this problem, there is "no methodology for isolating linguistic features which can

reasonably be attributed to the translator from those which are simply a reflection of the

stylistic features of the original". Pekkanen decided to fill in this gap by proposing a

method based on shifts in translation, i.e. optional formal changes in the target text

compared with the source text, which should reveal some stylistic differences between the

two texts. In Pekkanen's own words (2010: 28): "This study will approach style in terms of

literary translation on a purely textual basis by comparing the source text with the target

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text and thereby arriving at the translator's (…) tendencies – which may be either conscious

or non-conscious." This method will be described in more detail in Chapter 3.

To proceed to the second question, concerning the differences in style between

literary and non-literary texts, as noted by Boase-Beier (2006: 26), "literary texts must use

the same linguistic devices as non-literary texts but they are read differently". The

translators have to bear in mind that the two types of texts have different functions. While

the purpose of a non-literary text is usually to supply valid information and it tends to be

perceived as true in relation to the real world, literary text is, in general, taken as fiction,

which is "true in so far as it subscribes to an "ideal" of truth," (Boase-Beier 2006: 27), i.e.

the way of presentation is important. Therefore literary texts put much emphasis on the

aesthetic aspect, they use many figures like metaphors, repetitions etc., which play a crucial

role in the message of the author. Non-literary texts, on the other hand, are more factual

and although they may also use some figures, these figures have less important function.

This implies that literary translations put more emphasis on preserving the style, not just

the message.

This does not mean that non-literary texts are totally uninfluenced by the authorial

style. It is just less distinct. The question is how significant is the influence of the style of a

translator of non-literary texts, and whether it is possible to study it by the same method as

used by Pekkanen in the case of literary translations – by means of shifts in translation.

1.2. Shifts in Translation

The term "translation shifts" was for the first time introduced by Catford, who

discusses them in relation to translation equivalence. He describes these shifts as

"departures from formal correspondence in the process of going from the SL to the TL"

(Catford 1965: 73). He distinguishes between level shifts and category shifts, where the

former mean that there is a difference in level of the SL item and its TL translation, while

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in the latter these two items differ by category. However, the kinds of shifts presented by

Catford are based on differences between language systems and hence they are

unavoidable.

A different perspective of shifts is offered by Popovič in his book The Nature of

Translation, where he speaks about "shifts of expression" related to style. He distinguishes

between shifts motivated by differences in language and shifts caused by differences

between the author and the translator. Popovič characterises shifts as "all that appears new

with respect to the original, or fails to appear where it might have been expected"

(1970: 79). He assumes that shifts result from the translator's attempt to reproduce the

source text faithfully and that through these shifts the translator strives to transmit the style

of the original. Therefore, the analysis of shifts in expression should be used as an

important component of translation analysis. But Popovič describes the system of

evaluations of the shifts just very vaguely and does not propose any concrete method how

to put it into practice.

Probably the most detailed research on shifts has been carried out by van Leuwen-

Zwart, who proposed a method "for the establishment and description of shifts in integral

translations of narrative texts" (1989: 151). In this method she distinguished between shifts

on micro- and macrostructural level, where the macrostructural shifts resulted from the

microstructural ones. Therefore, the microstructural shifts were analysed first and the

results were subsequently reflected in the macrostructural analysis. For the purposes of the

analysis of the microstructral shifts van Leuwen-Zwart introduced a unit called "transeme"

and based the method on comparison of relationship between the transemes of the ST

with the transemes of the TT. In this way she developed a rather complex system of

categorisation, however due to its complexity this system seems not very easy to replicate.

Toury (1995: 57) considers shifts as "a true universal of translation" and he

distinguishes between obligatory and non-obligatory shifts, which is close to the

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categorisation adopted by Pekkanen. A slightly different kind of categorisation was used by

Kinga Klaudy (1997), who, in her works on explicitation, enumerates four kinds of shifts:

obligatory, optional, pragmatic and translation-inherent.

Obligatory shifts are shifts which are impossible to avoid without producing an

ungrammatical or unnatural translation. They can be motivated by syntactic, semantic and

phonological differences between the used language systems and differences between the

cultures involved (Pekkanen 2010: 37). However, the cultural aspect, included by Pekkanen,

can partly overlap with Klaudy's pragmatic shifts.

Optional shifts in Klaudy's (1997: 83) understanding are "dictated by differences in

text-building strategies (...) and stylistic preferences between languages". They are not

inevitable, but without them the text may sound clumsy. However, in Pekkanen's

categorisation this group includes shifts which represent a free choice of translators as well

as some obligatory shifts, which have more translation options. For the purpose of

Pekkanen's study, the most important factor is the possibility of choice for the translator.

Pragmatic shifts in Klaudy's terminology are related to cultural information, e.g. in

order to explain names which may be well-known in the source culture but less known for

the members of the target culture. In this thesis this kind of shifts is classified as obligatory,

as explained in sub-chapter 4.2.3. Differences between the English and the Slovak Language.

The last category, translation-inherent shifts are results of the translation process

itself and are in fact independent decisions of the translator. As mentioned above, in

Pekkanen's method this type of shifts is counted under optional shifts.

Since it is difficult to draw a clear line between the obligatory and optional shifts, in

some cases it may be disputable into which category a shift falls. However, this problem

will be further discussed in Chapter 4. First the attention will be devoted to problems that

arise in EU translation and which may influence the results of the present research.

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2. Translation in the European Union

2.1. Language policy of the European Union

The European Union is based on the principle of multilingualism. Since language is

an important instrument of power, and the EU wants to guarantee equal rights to all its

member states, also the languages of all these states have equal status. At present it means

that the EU has to translate all its documents into 23 official languages, and that creates a

base for the biggest translation service in the world. This unique language policy brings

along many other implications which make translation within the European Union quite

special.

The linguistic situation within the EU is a perfect demonstration of a practical

application of its motto "United in diversity". This supranational union is composed of a

number of various countries with different history, culture and traditions and this is also

reflected in the way they express themselves. The language used for policy making is not an

exception. While in some countries, like Finland, authorities try to simplify the language of

legal texts to make them more accessible to the general public (Pym 2001: 3), in some other

countries "concision is not a virtue" (Wagner 2001a), thus it is preferred to use unclear and

complicated language. To make the communication within the European Union possible, it

was necessary to look for some compromises in this domain. But instead of finding a

simple and clear way of communication, the hybrid called 'Eurospeak' was born.

Eurospeak is a term used to characterise the overcomplicated style of writing (and

speaking) used within the EU institutions. It can be "confusing, complicated and

sometimes elitist" (Wagner 2001a). And what is the main problem – it discourages the

ordinary European citizens from reading any documents published by the EU. As

expressed by Arturo Tosi (2005: 1), a professor of Royal Holloway University of London,

we are witnessing "an unstoppable process that is turning the voice of Europe into a new

Eurospeak which is unpalatable to most Europeans".

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2.2. Problems of EU translation

The documents of the European Union are usually denounced for being unclear and

hard to understand. And not surprisingly, it is often the translators who get blamed for this

incomprehensibility. But it is surely unjust to hold the translators responsible for all the

flaws of these texts. In his analysis of the EU translation problems Tosi (2005: 1) assumes

than "the voice of Europe is barely comprehended not because of the translators’

individual skills but as a result of anomalous procedures in the translation system." In fact,

there are a number of factors which contribute to these problems and I would like to

outline some of them.

Many of the problems of EU translation are connected to one feature characteristic

for the language policy of the EU – the notion of equivalence. As pointed out by Pym

(2001: 6), "the 'equal value' of all translations is a legal fiction necessary for multilingual EU

legislation to work". The EU consciously avoids labelling the texts as 'the source text' and

'the translations' because, following the principle of language equality, it considers all the

language versions to be equivalent and thus have an equal value. A question arises how to

guarantee this equivalence and prevent the meaning from being shifted during the

translation process, especially when several different language systems are used in this

process. The European Union tries to create the impression that in order to preserve the

meaning the translators only need to render the text word by word, ignoring the clumsiness

of the resulting translations. It means that the priority is given to the message over the

form – but if the message is preserved at the expense of clarity of the text, it does not

necessarily mean it will be understood.

Another group of problems is connected to what has already been mentioned in the

previous subchapter – the linguistic and cultural differences between the member

countries. The languages of the respective states differ in vocabulary, morphology and

syntax, but the EU insists on preserving the same structure of documents. As Pym explains

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(2001: 3), "this is so that directives and regulations can be modified and updated easily, just

by locating the appropriate text within the numbered section." But not all the languages are

flexible enough to cope with this uniformity – as a consequence the EU texts may sound

unnatural and clumsy to their speakers.

The differences in vocabulary are related to the formation of specialised EU

terminology. Since the European Union has to cope with many new concepts and a wide

range of international policies, it is constantly enriched with neologisms and new terms.

Some of these terms are culturally-bound to certain areas but in other areas they are totally

unknown and therefore hard to explain – e.g. the names of Atlantic fish (Wagner 2002: 62-

3). Some other new terms are borrowed from the dominant languages like English and

French and thus have to be adapted to the grammar of a new language system (Pym

2001: 3). For example, nowadays a big portion of the EU texts is drafted in English, which

is a language very innovative and flexible in creating new words and expressions, therefore

it can be quite difficult to translate these expressions into some other languages without

losing some of their meaning, or at least without using a longer and sometimes clumsy

description. Another option is to create an artificial new term which may be shorter but

sounds funny in the target language. The translator is thus often confronted with the

choice between keeping as close to the source text as possible at the cost of an unnatural

translation, or introducing some changes in the target text and risking shifts in the meaning.

A wide range of problems is related to the system of work of the translators within

the European Union. The attitude of the EU towards translation faces much criticism,

concerning not just the overcomplicated communication and unnecessary expenses. One

of the linguistic arguments is that the EU is always anxious about the legal equivalence but

neglects considerably the linguistic equivalence (Tosi 2). An example of the reckless

approach to linguistic equivalence is a method widely used within EU translation: in order

to simplify the translation process EU translators often have to use the "bridge"

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translations (especially for the less frequent languages like Slovak, Czech, Hungarian, etc.),

where the text is first translated into some "bigger" language like English or French and

only this language version is sent to the other translators. Naturally, this method

contributes to more shifts from the original document.

On the other hand, the area about which the EU really cares and in which it invests a

lot of resources is the technological support of translation process. The in-house translators

work with a complex system of translation tools, translation memories, corpora, glossaries

and software for translation management. Unfortunately, these are also devised in a way to

comply with the EU word-for-word obsession. The translation memories tempt their users

to cut out isolated terms and paste them into the translated text without paying much

attention to the context. Moreover, when looking for an expression in the EU memories,

corpora and glossaries, it is not rare to encounter two or more translations of one term

which was supposed to be a fixed expression, some of these translations being even

incorrect.

Here we come across another complication caused by the system – the duel between

quality and quantity. The EU translators are usually flooded by work and have not much

time left for searching every term in the databases and double-checking and polishing the

texts they produce. As stated by Wagner (2002: 80), who has the first-hand experience with

working for the European Commission, "public enemy number one is the unreasonable

deadlines by which we have to provide translations". Although each translation is supposed

to undergo thorough revision before being published, when we take into account the

quantity of the texts produced per year – the Directorate General for translation is

supposed to produce some 1.7 million pages a year (European Commission 2009b: 4) – it is

very hard to keep track of the terminology, monitor the quality of each and single

translation and coordinate their uniformity.

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 And finally, the last factor to be mentioned is the human factor. Before being

employed by the European Union, each translator has to go through a series of tests to

prove their competence. However, translators are still just normal people who make

mistakes, whether out of disregard or ignorance. While the former is sometimes excusable

by the time pressure, the latter is often influenced by the fact that the EU policies comprise

a huge range of topics and it is beyond human ability to be perfectly familiar with all of

them. The translators can always consult some specialist, but here the problem of lack of

time reappears again. It is true that verifying the terminology in the available resources is

sometimes neglected, which leads to using incorrect terms.

2.3. EU translation from the perspective of translation studies

Taking into account the problems of EU translation outlined above, it is clear that

this domain diverges in many aspects form the methods promoted by translation studies.

Nevertheless, it can be interesting to confront the theory and the practice and find out to

what degree they are compatible and in what respects they differ. As suggested by Wagner

(2001b: 263), who works in the European Commission: "Translation Studies scholars

should not stick traditional labels (...) on something that defies traditional preconceptions.

Instead they should make an effort to understand what the EU institutions are trying to do

and how they produce legislation, and the varied part(s) played by translation in EU

activities."

When trying to understand translation within the European Union, we should first

realize what makes it so special. EU translation violates many notions important for

translation studies, such as the source and the target text or the pattern of "one sender ->

one message -> one translator -> one audience" (Dollerup 2001: 285). Naturally, it has to

be taken into account that it falls into the category of non-literary translation, where the

rules of the game are generally different than in literary translation, which is usually the

18
object of translation studies. And then there is the concept of the multilingual community

and the special needs related to its policy which deepen even more the "gap between what

is being said in translation theory and what is being done in everyday work of EU

translators" (Koskinen 2001: 298).

As already mentioned, in EU translation it is usually difficult to distinguish the source

text from the translation. Even if nowadays the majority of documents is drafted in English

– it was 72.5% in 2008 (Translating for a Multilingual Community 2009: 5) – it is often a

result of work of a multilingual group which expresses their opinions in a mixture of

languages and these are consequently merged into one monolingual text serving as a basis

for the other language versions.

As for the sender (or the author) and the translator, it is very rare for the EU to cite

concrete names. In general, the notion of an individual author is not promoted, since the

documents usually are a group work and they are seldom edited by a single person.

Similarly, there is not an individual translator who would be responsible for a specific text.

"Translators are never alone. They are part of a team, and their output is seen and amended

by revisers, legal experts, delegates, politicians and proof readers." (Wagner 2001b: 265).

On the other hand, once translated and approved, the wording of the documents, and

especially of their titles, becomes binding and the translators are obliged to respect it in the

following translations. The translator thus loses the liberty to improve imperfect

translations or come up with better solutions.

From the perspective of text types and the audience EU translation is very

homogenous. Although the first thing that comes to our minds is probably the legislation,

in reality this work comprises much more than that: translation of speeches, briefings and

press releases, minutes, financial reports, administrative matters, promotional material,

correspondence, web pages and publications etc. This implies that the audience is very wide

and it may happen that the translator forgets to take this fact into account and adopt the

19
style of the document to the targeted readership. In the words of Wagner (2001b: 268),

"translators do sometimes allow the style of legislative texts to spill over into other

translations, often because of time pressure or inadequate briefing." This negligence is also

one of the aspects that make it difficult for the readers to understand EU documents.

When we consider all these differences between EU translation and translation

theory, it is understandable that it may be rather complicated to apply certain theoretical

concepts to this concrete sphere. As stated by Koskinen (2001: 293), "In contemporary

translation theory "there are some ‘self-evident’ facts about translation that are – within the

context of EU translation – either not valid at all or only acceptable with modifications.".

However, I would like to attempt to study shifts in EU translation using a method

proposed by Hilkka Pekkanen for literary translation. In this way I will try to study the

patterns of shifting within the EU texts and consequently I will try to see whether there are

any remarkable differences between the shifts in the EU documents compared with other

non-literary texts.

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3. An Analysis of Style through Shifts in Literary Translation – method

proposed by Hilkka Pekkanen

3.1. Objectives of the analysis

In 2010 Hilkka Pekkanen, a Finnish scholar, presented her academic dissertation

entitled The Duet between the Author and the Translator: An Analysis of Style through Shifts in

Literary Translation. In this work she proposed and tested a new method for translation

analysis focused on the study of the translator's style. The objective of this method was to

find a way to study the style of a translator without being influenced by other factors like

the style of the author or different features of the source language and the target language.

Pekkanen therefore based her research on the analysis of shifts made by the translators

during the translation process. To limit the scope of her study she concentrated exclusively

on the optional shifts made at the linguistic level. Her choice was motivated by the effort to

draw a clear line between the style of the translator and the style of the author, and at the

same time eliminate the shifts that were inevitable due to differences between the two

language systems (i.e. obligatory shifts).

The research of Pekkanen had several objectives. The first one was to identify and

classify "various formal shifts (changes) that translators have made at the linguistic level

during the translation process" (Pekkanen 2010: 11), the second one to determine whether

it is possible to characterize the style of individual translators based on their choices and

the recurrent patterns of shifts used in their translations, and the third objective was to try

to detect some "macrolevel stylistic implications (…) on the basis of an analysis of

microlevel shifts" (Pekkanen 2010: 12), i.e. try to suggest what implications the detected

shifts can have for the changes in the style of literary works. One further objective of

Pekkanen's research was to provide a replicable method which would enable translation

scholars to study style in literary translation across various language pairs.

21
3.2. Description of the method

For the purposes of her analysis Pekkanen selected four texts in English and their

translations into Finnish. In these texts she counted and classified the linguistic shifts

which she considered as optional. Afterwards she compared the differences between the

choices of respective translators. She attempted to identify some recurrent patterns which

would characterise their preferences and in this way determine whether it was possible to

use the shifts in translation to describe the translator's style. In the end, she tried to

generalise her findings and formulate the implications that would be observable throughout

entire literary works.

The four texts chosen for the analysis in Pekkanen's research were extracts from four

novels written in English and their Finnish translations. In her choice Pekkanen considered

many aspects. She selected translations which were chronologically close, to avoid the

influence of diverse external conditions. In order to see whether the style of the author has

some impact on the style of the translator, the four chosen literary works were written by

two authors, but translated by four different translators: Farewell to Arms and The Sun Also

Rises by Ernest Hemingway (translated by Mäkinen and Linturi) and Dubliners and A Portrait

of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce (translated by Saarikoski and Matson) (Pekkanen

2010: 53). In case similar patterns in translation shifts were noted in the translations of one

author, it could be assumed that the style of the author influenced the choice of the

translator. In addition to these four translations Pekkanen studied three supplementary

texts by different authors but translated by the same translators as the previous extracts:

Herzog by Bellow (translated by Saarikoski), The Pearl by Steinbeck (translated by Matson)

and The Quiet American by Greene (translated by Linturi) (Pekkanen 2010: 54). A translation

by Mäkinen was missing, as no translation comparable with the first one was found. If the

results for the pairs of texts translated by the same translator were similar regardless of the

author, it would be an evidence that respective translators have their own style.

22
 For each of the novels Pekkanen (2010: 57) selected 30 pages to be analysed and to

make the sample more representative, she always took 10 pages from the beginning, 10

from the middle and 10 from the end. At the same time, she removed all the dialogs and

dealt only with the narrative parts, to avoid spoken language and linguistic peculiarities

which could be present in the speech of the characters. For the three additional texts she

always took 10 pages from one novel. All in all the amount of the analysed text was around

150 pages both for the source and the target languages.

To keep the analysis within certain limits, Pekkanen (2010: 59) excluded some kinds

of shifts – namely punctuation and phonological and semantic shifts, although the latter

were taken into account in some other stages. All the data were collected manually. One of

the tricky parts was to determine exact rules about which shifts should be counted and

how. As acknowledged by Pekkanen herself, it was not always easy to decide whether a

shift was obligatory or optional, but she recorded only the ones she was sure about: "If

there was any doubt about whether a shift was optional or not, it was not included in the

statistics" (2010: 59). Another question was how to determine the length of respective

linguistic units. This issue was resolved in the following way: "The shift recorded was

always the largest entity that changed, up to sentence level. A shift expanding a phrase into

a clause, for instance, was recorded as expansion of a phrase into a clause and not as

addition of a word or words." (2010: 59).

For classifying the types of shifts Pekkanen (2010: 58) started with so called

"grounded theory", proposed by Glaset & Strauss, which she characterised as "a general

method for comparative analysis that starts with a loose analysis of the material and then

proceeds to classify similar concepts in categories for further analysis". According to the

prevailing types of optional shifts, she finally determined three main categories of shifts:

expansion shifts, contraction shifts and shifts of order. The fourth group comprised

23
miscellaneous shifts. These four categories were further split into more specific

subcategories.

Following this classification, Pekkanen (2010: 69) compared the recurrent tendencies

of respective translators. She found out that regardless of the author, Matson and Linturi

made many more shifts than the other two. She continued with a more detailed

comparison based on comparing the respective subcategories. Since respective extracts

from one novel showed no considerable differences in the pattern of shifting, the style of

individual translators could have been considered as consistent. Therefore in the following

part of her analysis Pekkanen took only 10 pages from each novel and compared them with

the three supplementary extracts translated by the same translators (for the fourth

translator no text of similar kind was found). This was an additional test of the translator's

style which was supposed to reveal whether different authors had any impact on the

translators. But the results turned up to be consistent with what was discovered in the

analysis of the first set of texts.

3.3. Findings and evaluation of the method

The main objective of the described research was to answer the question whether it is

possible to use the shifts in translation to identify the style of a translator - and whether the

notion of the "translator's style" exists at all. As concluded by Pekkanen (2010: 161),

"individual translators tended to opt for different types of shifts" and they were consistent

in their preferences in all the analysed extracts, regardless of the author. These findings

suggest that it is possible to draw profiles for individual translators, who have a style of

their own.

Coming back to the first objective, Pekkanen proposed a system of classification of

the shifts in translation, which should be replicable and serve as a universal method for

analysing the style of translator. However, she remarks (2010: 159) that it would be

24
necessary to further test this method with other kinds of texts and maybe also with certain

innovations. Since the adopted approach completely rules out the changes on the semantic

level, she proposes for example to use this method in a semantically-based analysis. In any

case, the use of multiple approaches would contribute to developing a fuller profile of a

translator.

25
4. Methodology

The objective of my research was to apply the method proposed by Hilkka Pekkanen,

as described above, on selected non-literary texts. The primary idea was to find out whether

this method would work with other than literary texts and what problems can be

encountered in this regard. But the authors and translators of non-literary documents are

often anonymous and it is not easy to find two documents by the same author or

translator, therefore the focus of the analysis could not have been on the style of concrete

translators and it was necessary to think of a different outcome of the research. For this

reason I have chosen as the subject of the analysis texts related to the European Union

with the goal to study frequency and character of the shifts in these translations.

The EU documents are often not translated by a single person but by a team, so it is

not possible to speak of style of an individual translator. However, since EU translation is

governed by strict rules, the documents may display some patterns which could be

characteristic for the whole EU group. At the same time, the EU puts much emphasis on

the equivalence in terms of content. This preference implies that the shifts in translation

might be avoided, often at the expense of clarity and readability of the text, and the number

of shifts in EU translations may be lower than in other kinds of non-literary documents.

In order to verify these hypotheses, I decided first to analyse and compare extracts

from three EU documents. I intentionally concentrated on texts intended for general

public, i.e. ordinary EU citizens, where the language used should be less formal and more

comprehensible, thus with a higher chance of translation shifts. Then, in order to

determine whether the numbers of shifts and patterns of shifting are different from other

kinds of non-literary translation, I selected three other non-literary documents which were

translated by organisations not related to the EU Institutions, but intended for the same

kind of public. The number and types of translation shifts in these three non-EU

documents were subsequently compared with the first three samples. But before I proceed

26
to the analysis of the results, I would first provide more details about the analysed materials

and the approach to the analysis.

4.1. Analysed texts

For the purpose of my analysis I chose extracts from six documents. All these

documents were originally written in English (even though the authors might have not

been native speakers – but in such a case the documents underwent some English

"polishing" prior to the publication) – and subsequently translated into Slovak. However,

the specific names of the authors or translators were not always indicated. As for the year

of their origin, the analysed documents were all published quite recently, within the time

span of the last 10 years (the oldest English text was published in 2002). The three non-EU

texts were obtained directly from Slovak offices of selected international NGOs. These

texts had to meet certain criteria – not to be related to the European Union and have an

original in English, while the Slovak version had to be a translation of this original, not just

its adaptation. Especially the last point proved to be quite problematic. After having

selected three documents which complied with these requirements, three EU texts were

chosen randomly, but in a way that they matched the thematic domains of the first group

of texts. However, one of the first analysed EU translations was of a very poor quality – in

structure it was quite loyal to the original, but there were considerable mistakes in

understanding and stylistics, therefore this document was replaced by a different one. A

final list of the selected EU and non-EU documents is described below and the word

counts of the whole documents as well as the samples studied can be found in Table 1

below.

27
4.1.1. EU documents

The selected EU documents comprised the following titles:

Practical Guide – Culture and Education (2009) – issued by DG for Internal Policies. The

author is indicated and although he is Portuguese, the original language of the document is

English. The name of the translator is not mentioned.

Natura 2000: Conservation in Partnership (updated 2009) – a report about conserving

global biodiversity, published by the Office for Official Publications of the European

Communities in Luxembourg. No specific names of authors or translators are indicated.

Waste of talents: turning private struggles into a public issue (Women and Science in the Enwise

countries) (2003, translated in 2004) – a report on women scientists in the Central and

Eastern Europe and in the Baltic States. It was written by Enwise Expert Group and there

was one specific person responsible for the English polishing. The name of the Slovak

translator is also provided.

4.1.2. Non-EU documents

The list of the non-EU documents was as follows:

NISPAcee (The Network of Institutes and Schools of Public Administration in

Central and Eastern Europe): Writing Effective Public Policy Papers (2002, translated in 2009) –

the document contains both the names of authors and the translator. The original was

published by Open Society Institute in Hungary (in English) and it was translated into

Slovak by the Institute of Public Policy and Economy at the Faculty of Social and

Economic Sciences, Comenius University in Bratislava.

Amnesty International: Unlock Their Future (2010) – a report on segregation of Roma

children in Slovak schools. The topic may suggest that the original document was written in

Slovak, but as it was verified, the original of the report was really in English. The author

and the translator are anonymous.

28
 Greenpeace: Hidden Consequences (year of publication not available) – a presentation

based on a report about river pollution, which includes case studies from several countries

all over the world. The names of neither the author nor the translator are stated.

For the sake of better transparency these extracts will be further referred to by the

names of respective organisations (i.e. NISPAcee, Amnesty International and Greenpeace).

From each of the above-mentioned documents, an extract of approximately 2,000

words was taken, i.e. around 8 norm-pages. Due to various lengths of respective

documents Pekkanen's model of choosing extracts from different parts of the documents,

was not followed. Instead the relevant number of words was always copied from the

beginning of the document, with the exception of the forewords and introductory

information, which were skipped because their form or content did not match the rest of

the document. All the tables, website links, footnotes and descriptions of figures and

photos were also left out. Most of the documents did not contain any direct speech, except

for the Amnesty International report about the Roma children, where several Roma

parents and children were interviewed, as well as their children and some specialists. Since

it was probable that the original interviews were recorded in Slovak, all of these interviews

and direct speeches were removed from the analysed extract. The following table provides

an overview of the numbers of words of respective documents and the researched extracts.

29
 Table 1. Word count of the analysed documents

Name of document Whole document Extract

English Slovak English Slovak

EU

Practical Guide – Culture and 44,430 37,431 2,002 1,706

Education

Waste of Talents 80,501 71,624 1,973 1,849

Natura 2000 7,113 6,750 2,005 1,959

Non-EU

Writing Effective Public Policy 47,153 40,632 2,106 1,847

Papers

Unlock Their Future 5,212 4,700 2,000 1,835

Hidden Consequences 2,092 1,569 2,077 1,559

4.2. Application of the method and related problems

After selecting the extracts from respective documents, the English versions were

aligned with their Slovak translations and compared for shifts in translation. Detected shifts

for each pair of texts were sorted into tables under the respective categories and finally

counted. This system of listing the shifts into a table was practical especially later during the

comparison, as it simplified looking up respective shifts and their further categorisation.

Like Pekkanen, I tried to consider only the optional shifts and at the same time leave

out all the shifts related to semantics and phonology and concentrate exclusively on formal

shifts. Nevertheless, since the method of analysis was based on manual collection of data, it

was inevitably influenced by the judgements of the researcher and susceptible to human

errors. As pointed out by Pekkanen (2010: 159), "if several collectors were involved in the

collection of the quantitative data, they might make differing decisions", both in terms of

30
drawing the border between obligatory and optional shifts and determining the category in

certain borderline cases. As an example we can take a look at the following shift:

ST: (for the Lisbon Treaty changes see below)

TT: (zmeny v Lisabonskej zmluve sú uvedené nižšie)

BT: (changes in Lisbon Treaty are listed below)

Although this seems like an optional shift in voice, I considered it as obligatory,

because in non-literary texts this is a common way of translating the phrase "see below"

and any other version (e.g. using the phrase "pozrite nižšie") would sound unprofessionally.

In some cases the problem of obligatory versus optional shifts could have been

solved by using Klaudy's category of translation-inherent shifts, as a group of changes

which depend on personal preferences of a translator (e.g. the problem of active/passive

voice, described in 4.2.3. Differences between the English and the Slovak Language). Unfortunately,

Pekkanen did not consider this option in her research.

During the analysis I also encountered several types of problems which were not

touched upon by Pekkanen, thus I had to determine my own rules for solving them. Some

of them were related to the categorisation and will be explained in the section describing

respective categories of shifts. Other gaps occurred due to the different character of the

analysed documents compared with the texts researched by Pekkanen (literary versus non-

literary texts). For instance, the non-literary texts usually use fixed terminology. Therefore if

there was a shift within the terminology, the shifted term was counted just once instead of

each time it occurred in the text. For example, if "policy" was translated as "verejná politika"

("public policy") – an expansion addition shift – it was counted only when encountered in the

text for the first time. And finally, some problems were caused by differences between the

compared language systems – different standards for word order, preferences for active or

passive voice, etc. These differences are discussed below in the section 4.2.3. Differences

between the English and the Slovak Language.

31
4.2.1. Types of translation shifts

Following the categorisation of Pekkanen, the translation shifts in this analysis were

divided into four main categories: expansion shifts, contraction shifts, shifts in order and

miscellaneous shifts. These were consequently split into several subcategories, with slight

modifications compared with the original categorisation. Respective categories and

subcategories will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 5.

As for the differences, the subcategories in the shifts in order have been changed as

the original categorisation did not match the types of shifts found in the analysed texts. The

subcategory 'other' was added for expansion and contraction. Also, deletions (and

additions) of repetition were transferred from miscellaneous shifts to contraction and

expansion shifts, as in the non-literary texts they do not play any special role that should be

considered separately from other kinds of deletion and addition.

4.2.2. Definition of units of comparison

Since one of the features important for the classification of the units was their length,

a few words should be said about the criteria for their categorisation. Three types of units

were distinguished within respective categories: words, phrases and clauses (or sentences).

For the purpose of this analysis, the label of phrase was given to any unit bigger than a

word (or a word plus an article) and smaller than a clause, including a group of nouns,

adjective + noun etc., but also longer units which would be otherwise considered as a

combination of more phrases. Some problems arose for the definition of clauses and

sentences. Firstly, the Slovak grammar does not make any distinction between a 'clause' and

a 'sentence' – in Slovak they both fall under what is considered as 'veta'. Moreover, the

definition of 'veta' in Slovak is slightly different from the English definitions of 'clause' and

'sentence'. While in English 'clause' means "a group of words consisting of a subject +

finite verb (+ complement or object if necessary)," (Alexander 2002: 2) and a sentence is "a

32
complete unit of meaning" (Alexander 2002: 2) composed of one or more clauses, the

Slovak 'veta' is characterised as "a grammatically ordered group of words or one word

expressing a comprehensive idea" (Pauliny and co. 329). The concept of 'veta' is thus

broader than those of a 'clause' and a 'sentence' − not only that 'veta' often does not have

any expressed subject, but in some cases it does not even contain any verb (non-verbal

sentence). On the other hand, as explained in an English grammar book, "One-word or

abbreviated utterances can also be complete units of meaning (…). However, these are not

real sentences because they do not contain a finite verb," (Alexander 2002: 2-3). In order to

ensure some uniformity, for the purposes of this analysis the unit was labelled as a clause

only when it contained a verb in a definite form and a subject, whether expressed or

unexpressed (including the subordinate clauses where the subject was expressed in or by

the main clause). Similarly, in English only the clauses with verbs in finite form were taken

into account.

4.2.3. Differences between the English and the Slovak Language

Before proceeding to the analysis of the differences between the English and the

Slovak texts, we must consider that many of the shifts in translation were brought about by

the differences between the two language systems. This concerns mainly the obligatory

shifts which will not be counted in the statistics. However, many optional shifts were also

motivated by these differences. In this section I will try to point out some of the

differences which had the most significant impact on the translation process.

Being an analytic language, English does not use many inflections. Instead it relies on

a rigid word order in the sequence subject-verb-object. Slovak, on the other hand, is a very

inflectional language. The inflections express the grammatical categories and relations

between the words, which allows the word order to be much more flexible. Besides, the

word order in Slovak has an additional function – it sometimes serves to express additional

33
semantic nuances, such as the theme-rheme relation. This can also be a motive for

changing the order of words compared with the English original. English for example

usually places the expressions of time at the end of the clause, which would mean in Slovak

that the time aspect is the rheme of this clause. Furthermore, it is quite typical for English

to start a sentence with an adverb or an adverbial phrase, while in Slovak this usually

happens only in literary style. Nowadays it is not uncommon for translators to let the

structure of English sentence influence them and they unconsciously transfer this word

order into Slovak. This is a typical example of "translationeese", as such a sentence tends to

sound unnatural. Here is an example of two translations; the first of them preserves the

word order at the expense of naturalness, the second one changes the order of the words

and phrases but is more correct in Slovak.

Preserved word order:

ST: However, despite its impressive stature, it should not be assumed that...

TT: Akokoľvek, napriek tejto pôsobivej štatistike, nemalo by sa predpokladať, že…

BT: similar to the ST.

Modified word order:

ST: However, with the development of the idea of lifelong learning, the distinction between

education and vocational training has become less clear in recent years

TT: Naplnením myšlienky celoživotného vzdelávania sa však v ostatných rokoch

začala deliaca čiara medzi vzdelávaním a odborným vzdelávaním stierať

BT: By fulfilling the idea of lifelong learning, however in recent years has the

distinction between education and vocational training become less clear

Another significant difference between English and Slovak can be found in verbs.

English has more tenses than Slovak and also some verb forms which do not have any

formal Slovak equivalent, like gerunds. Besides, in English some verb forms, like infinitives

34
and participles, are used in ways which would not sound natural if rendered to Slovak

without any modification, e.g.:

ST: These organisations had of course their journals to propagate their ideas to the wider

public

TT: Organizácie samozrejme vydávali vedecké časopisy na šírenie svojich myšlienok v širokej

verejnosti

BT: The organisations of course published their journals for propagation of their ideas

to the wider public

As for the changes in voice, the line between the obligatory and the optional shifts is

quite disputable. English has a tendency to use the passive voice very often. In non-literary

texts this form can be very convenient for example when we do not want to directly

express the originator of the action or to avoid repetition. However, the use of the passive

voice in Slovak is different. In the first place, Slovak has two types of the passive voice:

reflexive and periphrastic. While the periphrastic form is the one normally used in English,

the reflexive form does not have any equivalent in this language. In Slovak, on the contrary,

the periphrastic form is much less frequent and it is generally preferable to avoid it. For this

reason it is often replaced by the reflexive form, or sometimes it is modified by changing an

agent (which can be a problem if the originator of action is not clearly defined in the

original text).

Periphrastic form

ST: the position of women in the Enwise countries is on one hand proclaimed as advanced

enough, but on the other our different gender culture is defended

TT: postavenie žien v našich krajinách je na jednej strane označené ako dostatočne pokrokové, ale na

druhej strane je obhajovaná naša iná rodová kultúra

BT: similar to the ST.

35
Reflexive form

ST: The corresponding programmes were mostly launched in the second half of the

1980s or in the 1990s.

TT: Príslušné programy sa väčšinou naštartovali v druhej polovici 80. rokov alebo v 90.

rokoch.

BT: since this form does not exist in English, the back-translation is not

provided.

Change of the agent

ST: If the issue of women in science is to be grasped in its whole context

TT: Ak chceme pochopiť problematiku postavenia žien vo vede v celkovom

kontexte

BT: If we want to understand the problem of the position of women in science

in the whole context

On the other hand, there are situations when it is better to replace the English active

voice by the reflexive passive form in Slovak. This occurs mainly when we talk about

inanimate objects (e.g. treaties, articles) being responsible for the action:

ST: Article 149 says that the Community can adopt incentive measures in these areas

TT: V článku 149 sa uvádza, že Spoločenstvo môže prijímať podporné opatrenia

BT: In Article 149 is stated that the Community can adopt incentive measures

For this reason I usually considered the change in voice as an obligatory shift,

because keeping the original voice would have been incorrect according to the Slovak

norms. I only counted this shift as optional in cases where both possibilities – the active as

well as the passive voice – sounded naturally.

Another difference to be mentioned is that in Slovak it is common that proper names

of institutions, companies, groups etc. are preceded by a common name that characterises

the given institution. Especially if the proper name is of foreign origin and therefore is hard

36
to decline, this common name helps solve this problem. At the same time the word before

the proper name usually explains what the proper name stands for, therefore this kind of

shifts could be compared to Klaudy's pragmatic shifts. Addition of these common names is

inevitable for good translation; that is why the shifts of this kind were considered

obligatory as well, e.g.

ST: sites in Natura 2000

TT: lokality sústavy Natura 2000

BT: sites in Natura 2000 Network

There are many other details in which English and Slovak vary and which could

have been mentioned here as causes of shifts in translation. However, I tried to select the

ones that were encountered the most frequently during the present analysis.

4.3. Illustration of the method

In order to provide a practical explanation of the use of the method I selected an

extract from one of the documents (the NISPAcee document Writing Effective Public Policy

Papers) on which I would like to illustrate how the respective shifts were considered and

consequently counted or not counted among the optional shifts. The extracts are always

followed by a back-translation which should make the differences clear also for non-Slovak

speakers. However, it has to be taken into account that this back-translation is literal, with

the aim to point out the changes made in the Slovak version, and therefore it may

sometimes appear to be incorrect in English.

37
NISPAcee: Writing Effective Public Policy Papers

Fig.1. Illustration of comparison of two parallel texts

ST: This section of the book provides a brief overview of the community (1) and discipline

(2) of those involved in public policy-making (3). For beginners in the field, it

can serve as (4) a very basic introduction (5); for experienced policy specialists (6),

it provides a chance to reflect on the main concepts governing your work (7).

Ultimately, the reason (8) for this initial focus (9) on the community (10) is

for you as a writer to become more aware (12) of the key ideas, ideals, values and

contexts that frame and shape the writing of policy papers (13) in this

community (14).

TT: Táto kapitola publikácie poskytuje stručný prehľad o aktéroch verejnej politiky (1) a

vedných disciplínach (2), v rámci ktorých pôsobia spolu-tvorcovia

verejnej politiky (3). Pre začiatočníkov v tejto oblasti poslúži ako (4) základný úvod

do problematiky (5); pre tých skúsenejších špecialistov (6) ponúka šancu

pouvažovať o hlavných pojmoch, ktorými sa riadi ich práca (7). Tým hlavným

dôvodom (8), prečo sa hneď v úvode zaoberáme (9) problematikou aktérov

verejnej politiky (10), je naša snaha rozvinúť (11) Vašu vnímavosť ako

tvorcu analytického dokumentu (12) voči kľúčovým ideám, ideálom, hodnotám a

kontextom, ktoré rámcujú a formujú tvorbu analytického dokumentu (13).

38
 BT: This chapter of the publication provides a brief overview of the participants in public

policy (1) and scientific disciplines (2) within which work the co-creators

of public policy (3). For beginners in the field, it will serve as (4) a basic introduction

to the problem (5); for the experienced specialists (6), it provides a chance to reflect

on the main concepts, by which their work is governed (7). The main reason (8)

why right in the introduction we focus (9) on the problem of the

participants in public policy (10) is our attempt to develop (11) your

perception as a creator of an analytic document (12) towards key ideas, ideals,

values and contexts that frame and shape the creation of an analytic paper (13).

In the extract above, all the shifts made were highlighted and numbered. But not all

of these shifts are optional and thus some of them were not counted in the analysis. On the

following pages these shifts will be analysed one by one and explanations will be provided

on their categorisation.

(1)

ST: of the community

TT: o aktéroch verejnej politiky

BT: of the participants in public policy

The word "community" had been replaced by the phrase "participants in public policy".

However, this shift has a semantic character and therefore was not counted as an

expansion.

(2)

ST: discipline

TT: vedných disciplínach

BT: scientific disciplines

39
The word "scientific" had been added, therefore this shift was counted as expansion –

addition of a word.

(3)

ST: of those involved in public policy-making

TT: v rámci ktorých pôsobia spolu-tvorcovia verejnej politiky

BT: within which work the co-creators of public policy

In the target text the phrase had been changed to a clause. Since no new information had

been added to the original meaning, this shift was recorded as expansion – replacement of

a phrase by a clause.

(4)

ST: it can serve as

TT: poslúži ako

BT: it will serve as

The modality of the verb had been changed from "can" to "will", which falls into the

category miscellaneous – mood.

(5)

ST: a very basic introduction

TT: základný úvod do problematiky

BT: basic introduction to the problem

The adjective "very" had disappeared during the process of translation. But since its

translation in Slovak ("veľmi základný") would sound awkward, this shift was considered as

obligatory and was not counted. On the other hand, the phrase "to the problem" had been

added to the target text and this was counted as expansion – replacement of a word by a

phrase (introduction -> introduction to the problem), because this phrase had not brought any

new information.

40
(6)

ST: for experienced policy specialists

TT: pre tých skúsenejších špecialistov

BT: for the experienced specialists

This phrase comprises two optional shifts – an expansion of the word "experienced" to "the

experienced", which was counted as replacement of a word by a phrase, and contraction of

"policy specialist" to "specialists", which was categorised as deletion of a word, because it

implied a loss of a piece of information.

(7)

ST: the main concepts governing your work

TT: o hlavných pojmoch, ktorými sa riadi ich práca

BT: by which their work is governed

The voice of the verb had been transferred from active to reflexive passive form. But since

in the ST the agent is inanimate, this shift was considered as obligatory, as explained in the

chapter on differences between English and Slovak. This shift was thus not counted.

Neither was counted the semantic shift, where the pronoun "your" was changed to "their".

(8)

ST: Ultimately, the reason

TT: Tým hlavným dôvodom

BT: The main reason

The first word of the ST, the adverb "ultimately" had been left out in the TT, but it had been

replaced by the adjective "main" – therefore this shift was counted as the change in order of

words. In this case it may be disputable whether this shift is not obligatory, but there are

some ways, even if less elegant, how to avoid it (e.g. translate "ultimately" as "napokon").

41
(9)

ST: for this initial focus

TT: prečo sa hneď v úvode zaoberáme

BT: why right in the introduction we focus

In this case a phrase had been expanded to a clause, but without adding any extra

information, therefore it was classified as a replacement.

(10)

ST: on the community

TT: problematikou aktérov verejnej politiky

BT: on the problem of the participants in public policy

Similar to the point (1), the given shift is of semantic character and was left out from the

list. However, the word "problematika" was counted as expansion – addition of a word.

(11)

ST: -

TT: je naša snaha

BT: is our attempt

Although the whole clause had been partly modified compared with the original, this

phrase clearly does not have any equivalent in the source text. It was classified as an added

phrase.

(12)

ST: is for you as a writer to become more aware

TT: rozvinúťVašu vnímavosť ako tvorcu analytického dokumentu

BT: to develop your perception as a creator of an analytic document

The word "writer" had been replaced by "creator of analytic document". In this case it is

disputable whether the whole phrase should be considered as one semantic shift or

whether only the shift "writer" → "creator" is semantic and "of analytic document" is an

42
addition. Following the example of Pekkanen, I decided to consider the whole phrase as

one semantic shift and therefore it was not counted in the analysis. On the other hand, the

order of this phrase had been exchanged with the following phrase, "to become more aware",

and this shift was counted as a change of order of two phrases.

(13)

ST: the writing of policy papers

TT: tvorbu analytického dokumentu

BT: the creation of an analytic paper

Once again, this shift is purely semantic and therefore was not counted.

(14)

ST: in this community

This phrase had been left out completely in the translation, therefore it was counted as a

contraction deletion shift (deletion of a phrase).

This practical illustration was the last step in description of the method and its

application. In the following chapters respective categories and subcategories of translation

shifts will be discussed and the results of the research will be outlined and analysed.

5. Categories of Optional Shifts

This chapter deals with detailed description of the categories of shifts. It contains

explanations why some subcategories needed to be modified compared with Pekkanen's

model and examples of respective types of shifts. The general overview of the categories

and subcategories is provided in Table 2 below.

43
 Table 2. Categorisation of optional shifts in translation

Word -> Phrase

Replacement
Expansion Word/Phrase -> Clause

Added repetition

Other

Addition Word

Phrase

Clause/Sentence

Phrase -> Word

Contraction Replacement Clause -> Word/Phrase

Deleted repetition

Other

Deletion Word

Phrase

Clause/Sentence

Order Words

Phrases

Clauses

Miscellaneous Tense

Mood

Voice

44
5.1. Expansion shifts

Expansion shifts is a category of optional shifts where the unit from the source text is

expanded during the translation process and consequently gets longer in the target text.

Expansion can be split into two subcategories: replacement and addition.

Replacement means that although the unit is expanded, there has not been any

addition in terms of meaning. According to the length of the expanded units, the shifts

were divided into four additional groups:

Replacement of a word by a phrase (word → phrase)

ST: Europe’s forests are however also important for many other reasons: they prevent erosion

TT: Európske lesy sú však dôležité aj z mnohých iných dôvodov: pôsobia ako prevencia

erózie

BT: Europe’s forests are however important also for many other reasons: they act as a

prevention of erosion

Replacement of a word/phrase by a clause (word/phrase → clause)

ST: Leaving aside the two World Wars, the Enwise countries shared with the rest of

Europe

TT: Okrem dvoch svetových vojen, na ktorých sa podieľali krajiny skupiny Enwise so

zvyškom Európy

BT: Besides the two World Wars, on which participated the countries of Enwise

group with the rest of Europe

Added repetition

ST: EU should apply Article 151(4) more strictly and pay more attention to the

effect of other policies on culture.

TT: EÚ by mala uplatňovať článok 151 ods. 4 oveľa prísnejšie a mala by venovať

väčšiu pozornosť vplyvu ostatných politík na kultúru.

45
 BT: EU should apply Article 151(4) more strictly and should pay more

attention to the effect of other policies on culture.

Other

ST: But actual expenditure is established each year through the annual budget procedure. The

Committee on Budgets is responsible for this

TT: Skutočné výdavky sa každý rok stanovujú na základe každoročného rozpočtového postupu. Za

túto oblasť síce zodpovedá výbor pre rozpočet

BT: Actual expenditure is each year established on the basis of the annual budget procedure.

Although for this area the Committee on Budgets is responsible

When categorising the expansion replacement, I had often problems to categorise

phrases which were expanded into longer phrases without any information being added.

That is why the subcategory 'other' was added. Similarly, as mentioned before, I included

added repetition under expansion, and since this kind of addition does not introduce any

new information, it was placed under the replacement group.

Unlike replacement, the shifts classified as addition add some new meaning to the

expanded unit. Therefore it this kind of shifts usually brings more significant modifications

also from the semantic perspective. These shifts are also further divided according to their

length.

Addition of a word

ST: Further information is available on the European Commission’s nature website

TT: Ďalšie informácie možno nájsť na webovej stránke Európskej komisie o prírode a

biodiverzite

BT: Further information is to be found on the website of European Commission on nature and

biodiversity

46
Addition of a phrase

ST: As is clear from Table 1, which shows the structure of the multi-annual budget

TT: Ako vyplýva z tabuľky na druhej strane, ktorá zobrazuje štruktúru viacročného

rozpočtu

BT: As is clear from the table 1 on the opposite page, which shows the structure of the

multi-annual budget

Addition of a clause/sentence

ST: Yet, international and Slovak mental health experts and educational psychologists have

indicated that one-off assessments should not be used for the placement of children in

special education

TT: Deje sa tak aj napriek tomu, že mnohí medzinárodní i slovenskí odborníci na

duševné zdravie a školskí psychológovia poukazujú na fakt, že jednorazové hodnotenia

by nemali byť používané pri zaraďovaní detí do špeciálnych škôl

BT: This happens despites the fact that many international and Slovak mental

health experts and educational psychologists have indicated that one-off assessments

should not be used for the placement of children in special education

5.2. Contraction shifts

Contraction shift is a type of optional shift where the unit from the source text is

contracted within the process of translation and therefore the target unit is shorter or

contains less information. While the former is the case of a replacement shift, which does

not influence the meaning, the latter is labelled as deletion and is characterised by loss of

information from the semantic perspective.

In this analysis the contraction replacement shifts again comprise deleted repetition

where the information is not really removed, just it is not repeated for the second time. The

replacement group is again split into four subcategories:

47
Replacement of a phrase by a word (phrase → word)

ST: The case of the 'Swiss Toxic Dumps' is an example of the cumulative costs of clean-up

operations

TT: Prípad švajčiarskych toxických skládok je príkladom narastania nákladov na

vyčistenie

BT: The case of the Swiss Toxic Dumps is an example of cumulating of costs for cleaning

up

Replacement of a clause by a word/phrase (clause → word/phrase)

ST: It is not by accident that this kind of double rhetoric can be nowadays found again

in arguments by national political leaders

TT: Nie náhodou sa dnes takáto dvojstranná rétorika opäť objavuje v argumentoch

národných politických predstaviteľov

BT: Not accidentally today this kind of double rhetoric again appears in arguments by

national political leaders

Deleted repetition

ST: Approximately half of Romani pupils in Plavecký Štvrtok’s elementary school are

educated in special classes, which are de facto Roma-only classes

TT: Približne polovica rómskych žiakov v základnej škole v Plaveckom Štvrtku sú

vzdelávaní v špeciálnych triedach, ktoré sú de facto čisto rómske

BT: Approximately half of Romani pupils in the elementary school of Plavecký Štvrtok are

educated in special classes, which are de facto Roma-only

Other

ST: Indeed, it should be remembered that in the highly politicized world of public policy in any

region or context, it is not necessarily based on empirical analysis that

policy change occurs.

48
 TT: Nemali by sme preto zabúdať, že vo vysoko politizovanom svete verejnej politiky v

akomkoľvek regióne či kontexte, empirická analýza nie vždy predchádza

novelizáciam či reformám.

BT: Therefore we should not forget that in the highly politicized world of public policy in any

region or context, the empirical analysis not always precedes the

amendments or reforms.

Contraction addition shifts have three subcategories:

Deletion of a word

ST: Unlike traditional academia which focuses on building knowledge within a group of

peers

TT: Na rozdiel od akadémie, ktorá sa sústredí na tvorbu poznania v rámci skupiny

kolegov

BT: In contrast to academia which focuses on building knowledge within a group of peers

Deletion of a phrase

ST: One of the main changes of the Lisbon Treaty is the fact that it makes the Charter of

Fundamental Rights of the European Union binding

TT: Jednou z najdôležitejších zmien v Lisabonskej zmluve je skutočnosť, že Charta

základných práv sa stane záväznou

BT: One of the main changes of the Lisbon Treaty is the fact that the Charter of

Fundamental Rights will become binding

Deletion of a clause/sentence

- this case occurred only rarely when a whole sentence was left out – either by mistake or

on purpose as the translator considered it unnecessary (or maybe hard to translate).

49
 ST: They also show the immense difficulties - technical, economic and political - of cleaning up

these hazardous chemicals after release, including the very high expense of

restoration programmes and the impossibility of total

decontamination.

TT: Ukazujú aj nesmierne ťažkosti – technické, ekonomické a politické – ktoré sprevádzajú

odstránenie nebezpečných chemikálií po vypustení do prostredia.

BT: They also show the immense difficulties - technical, economic and political – which

accompany cleaning up of hazardous chemicals after release into the environment.

5.3. Shifts in order

This is the only category where considerable changes of subcategories were made

compared with the categorisation according to Pekkanen. Pekkanen's version comprised

four subcategories of changes in order: subject, verb (and object); order of expressions of

time and place; clauses and other. Perhaps it was also due to syntactic differences between

English and Finnish compared with English and Slovak, but the shifts in order in Slovak

were of a different nature and it was not possible to characterise them in terms of

constituents of the clause. Therefore a different categorisation was used, based on the same

units as in expansion and contraction – shift in order of words, phrases and clauses. Since it

sometimes happened that besides the change in order a word from the source text was

expanded to a phrase in the target text, or the other way round, it was always the units

from the source text which were taken as referential. Also when one of the elements in the

shift was a word and the other one a phrase, it was counted in the subcategory "word" –

this shift was considered as a change of the position of a word within a clause.

Changed position of a word/words

ST: The EU is now the second largest paper and sawn wood producer in the world.

TT: V súčasnosti je EÚ druhým najväčším výrobcom papiera a spíleného dreva na svete.

50
 BT: Currently the EU is the second largest paper and sawn wood producer in the world.

Changed position of a phrase/phrases

ST: EU spending in these areas is still relatively low compared with that of the

Member States, although it can still have considerable impact.

TT: Výdavky EÚ v týchto oblastiach sú v porovnaní s členskými štátmi stále

pomerne nízke, hoci ich vplyv je stále značný.

BT: EU spendings in these areas are compared with the Member States still

relatively low, although their impact is still considerable.

Changed position of a clause/clauses

ST: If school directors perceive that non-Roma pupils are leaving due to a higher intake of

Roma – referred to in Slovakia as ' white-flight" – segregation becomes a

convenient alternative.

TT: Segregácia sa stáva výhodnou alternatívou pre riaditeľov škôl v momente,

keď si uvedomia, že nerómski žiaci opúšťajú školu kvôli zvýšenému počtu prijatých

rómskych detí – tento jav sa nazýva „biely útek" („white-flight").

BT: Segregation becomes a convenient alternative for school directors in the

moment, when they perceive that non-Roma pupils are leaving school due to a higher

number of accepted Roma children – this phenomenon is called "white-flight".

5.4. Miscellaneous shifts

This category comprises three subcategories: shifts in tense, mood and voice. No

other miscellaneous shifts were detected which would fall into the subcategory 'other',

therefore this group was deleted.

51
Tense

ST: His mother was later told it was a class for "slower pupils", but she wonders how her

son can be "slow" when he received good grades before.

TT: Jakubovej matke bolo neskôr povedané, že je to trieda pre „pomalších žiakov“, ale ona

nevedela pochopiť, ako je to možné, že je „pomalý“, keď predtým dostával dobré

známky.

BT: Jakub's mother was later told it was a class for "slower pupils", but she did not

understand how it was possible that he was "slow" when he had received good grades

before.

Mood

ST: Article 151(4) also stresses that the Community must take cultural aspects into

account in its actions under other policy areas

TT: Článok 151 ods. 4 tiež zdôrazňuje, že Spoločenstvo zohľadní kultúrne aspekty vo

svojej činnosti v iných oblastiach politiky

BT: Article 151(4) also stresses that the Community will take cultural aspects into

account in its actions under other policy areas

Voice

ST: The Culture Committee’s work is often affected by Community action in areas

where it has stronger powers

TT: Prácu Výboru pre kultúru často ovplyvňujú opatrenia Spoločenstva v oblastiach,

kde má väčšie právomoci

BT: The Culture Committee’s work often affect Community actions in areas where it

has stronger powers

For this last subcategory a question arises to what degree the shifts in voice are

optional. Since no general rules exist for the use of active and passive voice, except

for some recommendations discussed in 4.2.3. Differences between the English and the

52
Slovak Language, the decision usually depends on personal preferences of the

translator, which fall into the category of optional shifts (with Klaudy's translation-

inherent shifts not being available). Therefore in the cases where in my opinion both

versions were acceptable – which was not very often –this shift was counted as

optional.

53
6. Analysis and Its Findings

In this chapter I would like to focus on the quantitative findings of the analysis,

compare and contrast the results for respective texts and categories and discuss the

conclusions that can be drawn on the basis of the presented findings. At first, the results

will be discussed from the perspective of the two groups of EU and non-EU texts, and

subsequently they will be analysed in more detail according to the individual categories and

subcategories of shifts. The chapter will be concluded by summarising the results and an

evaluation of the method.

6.1. General results for respective extracts

Table 3 below provides an overview of all shifts detected in the respective extracts.

The shifts are divided into four main categories and for each category the table states the

number of shifts within the extract and its proportion out of the total number of shifts in

the extract.

As shown in the last column of the table, the most frequent kind of shift is definitely

expansion – it represents 44.17% of the total number of shifts. This category of shifts

prevails in all the extracts with the exception of Greenpeace. This result is in line with the

findings of Pekkanen (2010: 80), who came to similar results in her analysis of literary texts.

This phenomenon can be explained by Blum Kulka's explicitation hypothesis (1986: 19):

"The process of interpretation performed by the translator on the source text might lead to

a TL text which is more redundant than the SL text."

Second in frequency of occurrence is contraction with 33.67%. However, this

number was augmented especially due to the Greenpeace extract – if this one was left out,

the contraction would account only for 25%. Less frequent are the shifts in order, which

represent 17.80% and then the miscellaneous shifts with mere 4.35%.

54
 The overall number of shifts found in each extract of approximately 2.000 words

ranges between 100 – 160 shifts per text. At the first sight the differences between the total

numbers of shifts in respective documents are not very distinctive, but a more in-depth

analysis can reveal some distinctions.

Table 3. Number of shifts and their proportions within individual extracts

EU texts Non-EU texts

Culture & Waste of Natura NISPAce Amnesty

Education Talents 2000 e Int. Greenp. Total

No. of shifts 43 50 79 82 65 26 345

Expansion % 39.09% 49.51% 53.38% 52.23% 48.15% 20.00% 44.17%

No. of shifts 28 26 29 49 41 90 263

Contraction % 25.46% 25.74% 19.59% 31.21% 30.37% 69.23% 33.67%

No. of shifts 29 19 33 20 25 13 139

Order % 26.36% 18.81% 22.30% 12.74% 18.52% 10.00% 17.80%

No. of shifts 10 6 7 6 4 1 34

Misc. % 9.09% 5.94% 4.73% 3.82% 2.92% 0.77% 4.35%

No. of

shifts 110 101 148 157 135 130 781

Total % 100% 100% 100% 100% 100% 100% 100%

Out of the three extracts from the EU texts, the highest number of shifts was found

in the third text, Natura 2000 – it comprises 148 shifts, compared with the second text,

Waste of Talents, which contains only 101 shifts. The difference is thus 47 shifts, which

means that Natura 2000 has almost 50% more shifts (precisely 46.5% more) than Waste of

Talents. The difference between Waste of Talents and the first extract, Culture and Education, is

much lower – only 9 shifts (101 shifts in the former, 110 in the latter). As shown in table 4,

the shifts in Natura 2000 represent 41.23% of the total number of shifts in all three

55
extracts, while the shifts in Culture and Education account for 30.64% and in Waste of Talents

only for 28.13%. When looked at proportionally, the differences between the highest and

the lowest figure in respective categories is 25.93%, 3.61%, 17.18% and 17.29%.

The disproportions between the first two texts in relation to the third one is caused

mainly by a considerable difference in the number of expansion shifts – while Culture and

Education comprises 43 expansions (accounting for 25% of the total number of expansions)

and Waste of Talents comprises 50 expansions (29.07%), for Natura 2000 it is 79 expansions

(45.93%).

The category with the most consistent results is contraction with 28 shifts in Culture

and Education, 26 shifts in Waste of Talents and 29 shifts for Natura 2000, which account

respectively for 33.73%, 31.33% and 34.94% of the total number of contractions.

In the case of the shifts in order and miscellaneous shifts, the gaps between the

figures are not significantly big, but they do contain some disproportions – namely the

number of shifts in order in Waste of Talents is slightly lower compared with the other two

extracts (19 compared with 29 and 33 shifts), and in the miscellaneous shifts, the figure for

Culture and Education is 10, while the other two extracts comprise only 6 and 7 shifts.

56
 Table 4. Shifts in EU extracts with percentages for respective categories

Culture & Waste of Natura

Education Talents 2000 Total

No. of shifts 43 50 79 172

Expansion % 25.00% 29.07% 45.93% 100%

No. of shifts 28 26 29 83

Contraction % 33.73% 31.33% 34.94% 100%

No. of shifts 29 19 33 81

Order % 35.80% 23.46% 40.74% 100%

No. of shifts 10 6 7 23

Miscellaneous % 43.48% 26.09% 30.43% 100%

No. of shifts 110 101 148 359

Total % 30.64% 28.13% 41.23% 100%

As for the non-EU extracts, the gaps between the overall numbers of detected shifts

are smaller than in the case of the EU extracts – the proportional distribution of shifts for

the respective extracts is 37.20%, 31.99% and 30.81%. However, when we look at the

respective categories, the results are less balanced.

The most striking is the substantial difference between the number of expansions and

contractions in the first two texts (NISPAcee and Amnesty International) compared with

the last one (Greenpeace). The latter is the only text where the number of contractions is

considerably higher than the number of expansions (69.23% of the overall number of shifts

within the extract are contractions and only 20% are expansions). While in NISPAcee and

Amnesty International extracts the gaps within one category are comparable with or smaller

than in the EU extracts (the biggest difference was between the miscellaneous shifts –

18.19%, then expansions – 10.17%, order – 8.62% and finally contraction – 4.44%), the

57
comparison with Greenpeace yields figures which are much higher – the difference

between the highest and the lowest figure is 44.46% for miscellaneous shifts, 32.37% for

expansion, 27.22% for contraction and 20.69% for order. Unfortunately, the reason for

these substantial disproportions is not obvious from the results, but as noticed during the

analysis, although the translator kept quite close to the source text, he (or she) had

tendency to leave out quite a lot of information, possibly because he considered it hard or

unnecessary to translate, such as in the following example:

ST: in order to avoid the accumulation of further costs to people, planet and profit as a result of

industrial pollution

TT: na to, aby sa predišlo hromadeniu budúcich nákladov pre ľudí, planétu a celkový osoh

BT: in order to avoid the accumulation of further costs to people, planet and overall profit

This explains both, the low number of expansions as well as the high number of

contractions. However, since this appears not to be a standard approach and by

consequence the Greenpeace results distort the average values of shifts, the Greenpeace

data will be in some cases excluded from the comparison.

58
 Table 5. Shifts in non-EU extracts with percentages for respective categories

Amnesty

NISPAcee International Greenpeace Total

No. of shifts 82 65 26 173

Expansion % 47.40% 37.57% 15.03% 100%

No. of shifts 49 41 90 180

Contraction % 27.22% 22.78% 50.00% 100%

No. of shifts 20 25 13 58

Order % 34.48% 43.10% 22.41% 100%

No. of shifts 6 4 1 11

Miscellaneous % 54.55% 36.36% 9.09% 100%

No. of shifts 157 135 130 422

Total % 37.20% 31.99% 30.81% 100%

When comparing the EU and non-EU extracts, the most noticeable is the difference

in the number of contractions – while in the EU texts only 83 shifts of this kind were

detected, in the non-EU documents it was 180 shifts. Even if we omit the Greenpeace

extract, where the high number of contractions could distort the results for the other texts,

the average number of shifts for the non-EU texts is 45 compared with the average of 28

for the three EU extracts. This suggests that in the non-EU texts the translators tended to

omit more information than in the case of EU translations. As for the expansion, here the

average values are more balanced – on the other hand, the representation of these shifts in

individual texts is rather unequal, as can be seen in table 7 below, which shows the

proportional distribution of shifts for the respective categories within all six extracts.

Although the average values for both, EU and non-EU extracts, are quite close, in each

group there is one text that stands out (Natura 2000 and NISPAcee) and has a higher

59
number of expansions than the rest. As for the shifts in order and miscellaneous shifts,

these categories appear to be more frequent in the EU documents, with a slightly lower

number in Waste of Talents, which is in general the text with the lowest number of shifts.

Table 6. Average values of shifts per extract respectively in EU and non-EU groups

non-EU

without

EU non-EU Greenpeace

No. of shifts 172 173 147

Expansion Average 57 58 74

No. of shifts 83 180 90

Contraction Average 28 60 45

No. of shifts 81 58 45

Order Average 27 19 23

No. of shifts 23 11 10

Miscellaneous Average 8 4 5

No. of shifts 359 422 292

Total Average 120 141 146

60
 Table 7. Proportions of shifts within respective categories

Culture & Waste of Natura Amnesty

Education Talents 2000 NISPAcee Int. Greenp. Total

No. of shifts 43 50 79 82 65 26 345

Expansion % 12.46% 14.49% 22.90% 23.77% 18.84% 7.54% 100%

No. of shifts 28 26 29 49 41 90 263

Contraction % 10.65% 9.89% 11.03% 18.63% 15.59% 34.22% 100%

No. of shifts 29 19 33 20 25 13 139

Order % 20.86% 13.67% 23.74% 14.39% 17.99% 9.35% 100%

No. of shifts 10 6 7 6 4 1 34

Misc. % 29.41% 17.65% 20.59% 17.65% 11.75% 2.94% 100%

No. of

shifts 110 101 148 157 135 130 781

Total % 14.08% 12.93% 18.95% 20.10% 17.29% 16.65% 100%

6.2. Results for respective categories

6.2.1. Expansion shifts

As already mentioned before, expansion is the most frequent type of shift for the

majority of extracts, with the exception of the Greenpeace document. Now we will look at

how the respective categories are represented.

Expansion has two main subcategories – replacement and addition. Table 8 below shows

that while in the EU extracts generally the translators opted more often for the former type

of shifts (69.77-50%), in non-EU documents addition was more frequent (61.54-58.46%).

This fact suggests that in the non-EU documents the tendency to add supplementary

information was higher than in the EU texts.

61
 As for the kinds of units that were expanded, for the replacement category it was

most common to replace a word by a phrase, then a word or a phrase by a clause. A

considerable number of added repetitions was recorded only in the first two EU texts (7

and 5 respectively). In the subcategory of additions it was, quite naturally, mainly the

smallest units, i.e. words, that dominated, although in the non-EU documents the addition

of phrases was quite frequent (as usual, with the exception of Greenpeace). Again, it seems

that the translators of the non-EU texts tended to add longer pieces of information. The

addition of clauses was quite rare for all kinds of text.

62
 Table 8. Results for respective expansion subcategories

EU texts Non-EU texts

Culture & Waste of Natura Amnesty

Education Talents 2000 NISPAcee International Greenpeace

Replacement W→P 13 10 25 16 16 3

% 30.23% 20% 31.65% 19.51% 24.62% 11.54%

W/P→C 7 9 12 14 6 6

% 16.28% 18% 15.19% 17.07% 9.23% 23.08%

added rep. 7 5 2 1 2 1

% 16.28% 10% 2.53% 1.22% 3.08% 3.85%

other 3 1 9 3 3 0

% 6.98% 2% 11.39% 3.66% 4.61% 0%

Total 30 25 48 34 27 10

% 69.77% 50.00% 60.76% 41.46% 41.54% 38.46%

Addition word 8 17 20 33 21 11

% 18.60% 34% 25.32% 40.24% 32.31% 42.31%

phrase 4 8 7 14 14 4

% 9.30% 16% 8.86% 17.07% 21.54% 15.38%

clause/sent. 1 0 4 1 3 1

% 2.33% 0% 5.06% 1.22% 4.61% 3.85%

Total 13 25 31 48 38 16

% 30.23% 50.00% 39.24% 58.54% 58.46% 61.54%

Total 43 50 79 82 65 26

% 100% 100% 100% 100% 100% 100%

63
6.2.2. Contraction shifts

If it was not for the Greenpeace extract, contraction would appear to be the most

consistent category of shifts – at least when we look separately at the EU and non-EU

groups of texts. However, from the breakdown of this category it is finally evident why the

number of contractions in Greenpeace is so high – it comprises 56 cases of word deletion

(62.22% of the total number of contractions in the extract), 25 cases of phrase deletion

(27.78% of the total) and 2 deleted clauses (2.22%). In this extract deletion thus accounts

for 92.22% of all the contractions, which means that a great deal of information was

probably lost.

As for the other five extracts, here as well the number of deletions is higher than for

repetitions, but the difference is less striking – while the proportion of replacements is

between 17.86% and 38.46%, the percentage for deletion accounts for 61.54% to 82.14%.

In the replacement subcategory the number of shifts is relatively low and it is hard to

say which kind of replacement is the most frequent one – among the six extracts there are

three texts where phrase by word replacement has the majority and three cases where

clause by phrase/word replacement was more frequent. Moreover, in the NISPAcee text

the most numerous group is deleted repetition.

On the other hand, the winner in the deletion subcategory is clear. The proportion of

word deletion spans between 68.97% and 46.34%, while for phrase it is only 28.57% to

10.34%. In general the latter kind of deletion was more popular in the non-EU documents.

Deletion of a clause/sentence occurred only in two extracts.

64
 Table 9. Results for respective contraction subcategories

EU texts Non-EU texts

Culture & Waste of Natura Amnesty

Education Talents 2000 NISPAcee International Greenpeace

Replacement P→W 3 3 2 0 5 4

% 10.71% 11.54% 6.90% 0% 12.20% 4.44%

C→W/P 1 4 3 2 4 2

% 3.57% 15.38% 10.34% 4.08% 9.76% 2.22%

del.rep. 1 3 0 6 4 1

% 3.57% 11.54% 0% 12.24% 9.76% 1.11%

other 0 0 1 1 0 0

% 0% 0% 3.45% 2.04% 0% 0%

Total 5 10 6 9 13 7

% 17.86% 38.46% 20.69% 18.37% 31.70% 7.78%

Deletion word 16 11 20 26 19 56

% 57.14% 42.31% 68.97% 53.06% 46.34% 62.22%

phrase 7 4 3 14 9 25

% 25.00% 15.38% 10.34% 28.57% 21.95% 27.78%

clause/sent. 0 1 0 0 0 2

% 0% 3.85% 0% 0% 0% 2.22%

Total 23 16 23 40 28 83

% 82.14% 61.54% 79.31% 81.63% 68.29% 92.22%

Total 28 26 29 49 41 90

% 100% 100% 100% 100% 100% 100%

65
6.2.3. Shifts in order

Even when broken down into subcategories according to respective units, this

category does not reveal any outstanding information. The ratio of shifts in positions of

words and phrases is almost balanced, the biggest gap is to be found in Natura 2000 where

the word units were shifted only in 36.36% of cases compared with 63.64% for phrases.

The shifts in the order of clauses occurred only three times, in two of the extracts.

However, the number of shifts in order is slightly higher for the EU documents compared

with the other group.

Table 10. Results for respective subcategories of shifts in order

EU texts Non-EU texts

Culture & Waste of Natura Amnesty

Education Talents 2000 NISPAcee International Greenpeace

Words 15 9 12 8 13 7

% 51.72% 47.37% 36.36% 40.00% 52.00% 53.85%

Phrases 14 9 21 12 10 6

% 48.28% 47.37% 63.64% 60.00% 40.00% 46.15%

Clauses 0 1 0 0 2 0

% 0% 5.26% 0% 0% 8.00% 0%

Total 29 19 33 20 25 13

% 100% 100% 100% 100% 100% 100%

66
6.2.4. Miscellaneous shifts

This category is quite small in terms of the number of shifts and not all its

subcategories are represented in all six extracts. The least frequent are shifts in tense,

followed by the shifts in voice and the most numerous subcategory is the shifts in mood.

However, their distribution is not very balanced – in general the miscellaneous shifts are

more frequent in the EU extracts. These proportions would slightly change if the

disputable group of shifts in voice was left out – in such a case the distribution of shifts

between EU and non-EU texts would be more balanced, with the highest numbers in the

first EU text (8), followed by NISPAcee (6). The third EU text would have 4 shifts, the

second EU text and Amnesty would both have 3 shifts and Greenpeace would have none.

That would still mean more shifts for the EU texts, but the gap between the two groups

would be smaller.

Table 11. Results for respective subcategories of miscellaneous shifts

EU texts Non-EU texts

Culture & Waste of Natura NISPAcee Amnesty Greenpeace

Education Talents 2000 International
Tense 0 2 3 3 2 0

% 0% 33.33% 42.86% 50.00% 50.00% 0%

Mood 8 1 1 3 1 0

% 80.00% 16.67% 14.29% 50.00% 25.00% 0%

Voice 2 3 3 0 1 1

% 20.00% 50.00% 42.86% 0% 25.00% 100%

Total 10 6 7 6 4 1

% 100% 100% 100% 100% 100% 100%

67
6.3. Summary of the findings

The objective of this analysis was to look at the translation shifts in two groups of

texts – the EU extracts and the non-EU extracts – and try to detect whether there were any

patterns that would characterise shifting in these two kinds of non-literary documents and

maybe distinguish EU translation from other non-literary texts.

As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, at the first sight the figures for the

overall number of shifts in respective extracts appear to be quite balanced with no

significant deviations. It can be therefore assumed that the frequency of shifting in EU and

non-EU texts does not differ considerably. However, what can be different is the character

of these shifts.

The most evident difference between the analysed EU and non-EU extracts is in the

number of contraction shifts – while the extracts in the former group account for 9.89-

11.03% of the total number of contractions, the latter represent 15.59-34.22% of all the

contractions. And since in the contraction category the majority of shifts are the cases of

deletion (for EU extracts 61.54-82.14%, for non-EU extracts 68.29-92.22%), it seems that

the non-EU translators have a stronger tendency to omit information than the EU

translators. This conclusion is thus in line with the hypothesis that the EU translations

should be more consistent in preserving the information from the source text.

As for the expansion, it appears that its frequency is various for both the EU as well

as the non-EU documents. However, one important difference, which is noticeable only

from the detailed breakdown of the expansion category, is that for the EU extracts it is the

replacement subcategory which is dominant (69.77-50%) and for the non-EU extracts it is

the addition subcategory (61.54-58.46%). Besides, in the non-EU extracts the addition of

longer units, i.e. phrases, is more frequent than in the EU extracts. These three facts imply

that the translation process of non-EU documents included a higher degree of information

modification.

68
 On the other hand, the EU documents work slightly more with shifting the order of

words and phrases – this could be explained by the fact that the sentences within the EU

documents tend to be long and complicated, or it can be a compensation to avoid other

kinds of shifts (expansion and contraction).

Finally, the miscellaneous shifts are more frequently found in the EU documents, but

still, their number is relatively low compared with the other categories, so the difference is

not very remarkable.

To summarise the findings of the analysis, it seems that in general the style of non-

literary translations is much less affected by the translator than in literary texts, as the

differences between the number of shifts in respective documents is not very significant

(compared with the results of Pekkanen's analysis (2010) of literary texts). Contrary to the

expectations, there is not any significant gap between the number of shifts in the EU

documents and other kinds of non-literary texts. However, the results of the analysis of the

small corpus of texts used within this thesis suggest that there are slightly different patterns

in the character of shifts that tend to prevail in these two kinds of documents. While the

EU texts contain more shifts which modify just the form of units but not their meaning

(expansion replacement shifts, shifts in order, miscellaneous shifts), the non-EU

documents contain more shifts adding or deleting information (expansion addition shifts,

contraction).

6.4. Evaluation of the method and its problems

The above-described research has confirmed that the method proposed by Hilkka

Pekkanen and used to study shifts in literary translation can be equally applied to non-

literary documents. However, the analysis does not yield as distinctive figures as in the case

of literary texts and the differences in style of respective translators are less evident (maybe

with the exception of the Greenpeace text). Here a question arises whether it is because the

69
translator's style is less expressed in non-literary texts or because the shifts prevailing in

these texts are of a different nature which is not covered by this method. Based on my

observations during the analysis I would say that in non-literary texts more emphasis is put

on the accuracy of the content than on style and the quality of language. And the content

touches mainly the semantic perspective, which, as Pekkanen emphasises (2010: 162), is not

studied by this method: "the purely formal approach (…) does not reveal differences

between the semantic fields of the source language and target language words used".

Therefore the method does not help judge the accuracy of a translation, neither its

readability. On the other hand, as revealed by the results of the present analysis, it can help

find out how faithful the translators are in transferring respective units of the source text to

the target one, which is also partly connected with preserving its content.

As for other problems connected to the application of this method, most of them

have already been mentioned in other parts of this thesis, therefore at this point I would

like to make a brief summary of them.

One of the main problems is the subjectivity of the method – since there is not any

universal template for categorisation of shifts, all depends just on the judgement of the

researcher. It is also necessary to take into consideration some human errors due to which

a shift can be categorised incorrectly or overlooked. These problems have been considered

also by Pekkanen (2010: 160), who states that "the method is based on the frequency of

recurrence" and thus even if some shift is classified incorrectly, it should not distort the

overall results. However, in my opinion, different researchers can also have slightly

different views of the respective categories and the particular types of shifts that fall under

them. For example, during my analysis I had to create a new subcategory (other shifts) in

expansion and contraction shifts for the shifts that I did not consider to match the criteria

of any of the subcategories proposed by Pekkanen.

70
 Another problem is also connected to categorisation, namely the division of the shifts

in order – the subcategories used by Pekkanen did not comply with the kind of shifts that

were found in the analysed non-literary extracts. It might be connected with the differences

between the language systems (Finnish versus Slovak), but also with the different character

of the analysed documents – since sentences in non-literary documents tend to be long and

complicated, they may need different types of order shifting.

That brings us to a group of problems related to some features by which non-literary

texts differ from the literary ones. While some of these features may have a special function

in literary translation, in non-literary texts this function is less important – this is the case of

repetitions, which were studied as a specific group in the analysis of the literary texts, but in

the analysis of the non-literary documents they were considered just as another kind of

expansion/contraction. Another difference between the two types of documents is that

while the language of a literary work should be always smooth and readable, in many non-

literary works it is unnatural by default. Consequently it may be more difficult to distinguish

between obligatory and optional shifts, since the translator at some points uses

formulations which do not sound natural and should have been shifted, and at other points

he does shift them. This problem related to translator's preferences might have been partly

solved by introducing a category equivalent to Klaudy's translation-inherent shifts.

The last problem that should be considered is the differences between the respective

languages for which the method is used. These may redefine the line between what is

obligatory and what optional shifting and create a need to slightly modify some

subcategories of shifts.

In any case, despite some above-mentioned problems I think this method meets its

purpose as a universal and replicable tool to study the preferences of translators as one of

the features of the translation process.

71
CONCLUSION

In this thesis a method proposed by Hilkka Pekkanen for studying shifts in literary

translation was applied to non-literary documents. The intention with which Pekkanen

created this method was to study style of individual translators in translations of literary

works. This thesis aimed at testing the application of the method on a different type of

texts and a different target language. Since for non-literary texts the author and the

translator are rarely known, instead of studying style of individuals the focus was put on the

style of a specific group of texts, namely European Union translations. In EU translation

big attention is paid to translational equivalence of respective language versions of

documents, because all of them have equal legislative value. The question was how this fact

would be reflected in the style of translations and whether it would have any impact on the

occurrence of translation shifts.

Before proceeding to the analysis, it was necessary to pay attention to some

theoretical issues – therefore the thesis starts with explaining what style and translation

shifts are and how they can be studied. Afterwards it looks in more detail at the problems

of EU translation and what impact these problems could have on the present research. The

next chapters deal with Pekkanen's method and its application for the purposes of the

present research – they offer some explanations and definitions as well as practical

illustrations of the application and describe related problems. The last chapter provides

results of the analysis for respective extracts and compares them first on a general level and

then on the level of respective categories and subcategories of shifts.

In order to find answers to the research questions outlined in the introductory part of

this work, a corpus of three EU texts and three non-EU texts was put together and

analysed for translation shifts. Afterwards the results for the two groups were compared

and on their basis conclusions were drawn, which will be summarised in the following

paragraphs.

72
 The first research question was whether Pekkanen's method would work for studying

shifts in non-literary translation. This question can be answered in affirmative; however, it

seems that the differences in the total numbers of shifts in non-literary texts are not as

distinctive as in literary translation. This implies that in non-literary texts the translator's

style is less pronounced. At the same time some minor modifications had to be made in the

categorisation of shifts, related either to differences between literary and non-literary texts

or between language systems. The thesis presents the method with these adjustments.

The second research question concerns the frequency of shifts in EU translation and

the patterns of shifting that would be common for all EU texts, due to the strict language

policy of the Union. The outcomes of the analysis show that there are some differences in

numbers of shifts in respective documents, mainly in the category of expansions, which

were the most numerous group of shifts. On the other hand, the numbers for contractions,

which were the second most frequent type of shifts, were quite consistent. These results of

an analysis of the limited corpus of texts, which were however randomly chosen, suggest

that EU translators might tent to take more liberty in adding or expanding information, but

take more care when it comes to omitting or reducing content. Finally, the differences

between the EU documents (and also non-EU documents, as discussed in the following

paragraph) appear to be considerably lower than in the case of literary texts, and this fact

again confirms the conclusion from the previous paragraph that the translator's style plays

less significant role in these documents.

When comparing the shifts in the analysed EU translations with the analysed non-EU

extracts, which was the subject of the third research question, the first conclusion is that

there are no distinctive differences between the total numbers of shifts in the EU extracts

and the non-EU extracts. However, these two groups differ in some patterns of shifting,

which could be summarised in three points:

73
 1. the translators of non-EU documents tend to make more contraction shifts than

the translators of EU documents;

2. in the category of expansions the translators of non-EU texts more often opt for

additions (i.e. adding information), while in EU texts replacement shifts prevail

(expansion of units without adding any information);

3. in non-EU translation additions of longer units (phrases) are more frequent.

These results suggest that in non-EU texts the translators tend to modify information

to a higher extent compared with the EU translators.

The findings of the present analysis partly confirmed the hypothesis that the shifts in

EU translation differ from other non-literary texts, even if not in number, at least in their

character. Although the studied corpus was relatively small, it yielded interpretable results

which could serve as a basis for further research.

74
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78
Resumé – English

This thesis is focused on studying translation shifts in non-literary documents by

means of a method proposed by a Finnish scholar Hilkka Pekkanen. This method had been

originally created for literary translation and the objective of the present thesis was to test

its application on a different kind of texts. Another objective was to use this method to

study shifts in EU translations, which represent a special type of non-literary texts. Since in

the EU documents much emphasis is put on translation equivalence, they could contain

lower number of shifts. The third and the last objective was to compare translation shifts in

the EU documents and other non-literary documents to find out whether EU translation

has some features that would distinguish it from other non-literary translations.

In order to study shifts in non-literary translation, a sample of six texts was taken -

three of them were translations from the European Union institutions and three were from

other translated non-literary texts. Each of these extracts was analysed for translation shifts,

which were divided into four categories: expansion, contraction, shifts in order and

miscellaneous shifts categories were further split into several subcategories.

Based on the findings of the analysis it can be stated that Pekkanen's method is also

applicable to non-literary translations. Although there were no considerable differences in

numbers of shifts in EU and non-EU translations, these two groups differed in the

character of shifts. First, in the non-EU documents translators tended to make more

contraction shifts than in the EU documents. Second, in the category of expansions the

translators of non-EU texts opted more often for additions (i.e. adding information), while

in the EU texts replacement shifts prevailed (expansion of units without adding any

information). Finally, in the non-EU extracts additions of longer units (phrases) were more

frequent. These facts thus suggest that the non-EU translators had higher tendencies to

modify information during the translation process.

79
Resumé – Slovak

Táto diplomová práca sa zaoberá problematikou posunov v preklade neliterárnych

textov pomocou metódy, ktorú vypracovala fínska lingvistka Hilkka Pekkanen. Daná

metóda bola pôvodne určená na analýzu literárnych prekladov, cieľom tejto diplomovej

práce však bolo pokúsiť sa o jej aplikáciu na neliterárne texty. Ďalším cieľom bolo zároveň

využiť túto metódu na sledovanie posunov v preklade textov EÚ, ktoré predstavujú

špecifickú kategóriu neliterárnych textov. V rámci EÚ sa kladie veľký dôraz na prekladovú

ekvivalenciu, takže by tieto dokumenty mohli obsahovať menej posunov. Tretím a

posledným cieľom bolo porovnať posuny v textoch EÚ s inými typmi neliterárneho

prekladu a zistiť, či v prekladoch EÚ existujú nejaké znaky, ktorým by sa tieto preklady

odlišovali od iných neliterárnych prekladov.

V rámci výskumu posunov v preklade bola vybraná vzorka šiestich neliterárnych

prekladov, z toho tri texty preložené v rámci inštitúcií EÚ a tri iné neliterárne preklady.

V každom z týchto úryvkov boli vyhľadané prekladové posuny, ktoré boli rozdelené do

štyroch kategórií: expanzia, kontrakcia, zmena poradia a rôzne posuny. Tieto kategórie boli

ďalej rozčlenené na niekoľko vedľajších kategórií.

Výsledky analýzy nám dovoľujú konštatovať, že metóda H. Pekkanen je použiteľná

i pre neliterárne texty. Hoci neboli zaznamenaná výrazné rozdiely v počtoch posunov

medzi textami EÚ a inými neliterárnymi textami, líšili sa tieto dve skupiny typom posunov.

Po prvé, v textoch EÚ prekladatelia používali kontrakciu menej často ako v iných

neliterárnych prekladoch. Po druhé, v rámci expanzie prekladatelia iných neliterárnych

textov častejšie volili pridávanie (t.j. pridávali informácie), kým v textoch EÚ prevládalo

nahrádzanie (t.j. rozšírenie jednotky bez pridania informácií). A nakoniec v iných

neliterárnych textoch prekladatelia častejšie pridávali dlhšie jednotky (slovné spojenia).

Tieto skutočnosti naznačujú, že prekladatelia iných neliterárnych textov mali v rámci

prekladateľského procesu väčšie tendencie informácie modifikovať.

80