Hassiba Benbouali University of Chlef

Faculty of Foreign Languages

Department of English

 Module: Initiation à la Traduction

 Level: Second year
 Teacher in charge: F. Boukhelef
 S1

Translation Local Strategies(procedures)/Transposition

Academiv Year 2022-2023

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Translation Local Strategies(TranslationProcedures‫(أساليب الترجمة‬

Vinay and Darbelnet list seven translation procedures. Three direct and four
indirect.

a-Direct Procedures‫أساليب مباشرة‬

-borrowing ‫اإلقتراض‬

-calque ‫المحاكاة‬

-literal translation ‫الترجمة الحرفية‬

b-Indirect Procedures ‫أساليب غير مباشرة‬

-transposition ‫اإلبدال‬

-Modulation ‫التطويع‬

-Equivalence ‫التكافؤ‬

-Adaptation ‫التصرف‬

Indirect Procedures ‫األساليب غير المباشرة‬

Transposition‫اإلبدال‬

Eg : After hecomes back. ‫بعد عودته‬

V N

Transposition involves replacing one word class with another without changing
the meaning of the message.

Transposition, or shift as Catford called it, reflects the grammatical change that
occurs in translation from SL to TL.

Newmark (1988), argues that transposition consists of four types of grammatical

changes :

The first type concerns words’ form and position. For instance, ‘furniture’ is
translated as ‘des meubles’ and ‘equipment’ as ‘des équipements.’ Here, it is
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obvious that the English singular words are changed to plural forms in French.
Concerning position change, it refers to the shift that occurs in words order. To

clarify this procedure, let’s see the following English/Arabic examples: ’a red
car,’ ’ ‫راء‬K‫يارة حم‬K‫’ ’; س‬a beautiful girl,’ ’ ‫ة‬K‫اة جميل‬K‫ فت‬.’ Here, we notice that the
position of the adjective changes from English to Arabic. This change in
position is not random; it rather depends on the TL structure.

The second type of transposition is usually used when the TL does not have the
equal grammatical structure of the SL. Here, the translator looks for other
options that help conveying the meaning of the ST.

For the third type, Newmark (1988) defines it as "the one where literal
translation is grammatically possible but may not accord with the natural
usage in the TL." Transposition here offers translators a plenty of possible
versions. For instance, the SL verb can shift to a TL empty verb plus noun:

J’ai parlé au parlement hier.

I gave a speech in the parliament yesterday.

The SL adverbial phrase becomes an adverb in the TL:

ST: D’une façon cruelle.

TT: Cruelly.

The fourth type occurs when the translator uses a grammatical structure as a way
to replace a lexical gap. For the sake of clarification, one of the interesting
examples given by Newmark (1988) in his Textbook of Translation is used
below :

ST: Après sa sortie.

TT: After he’d gone out.

It is obvious here that the grammatical structure of the TLT is used by the translator as a way
to compensate for the lexical gap existing in its linguistic system.

In short, transposition concerns the changes of grammatical categories in

translation. This procedure is very common among translators, for it offers them
a variety of possibilities that help avoiding problems of untranslatability. It
should be noted that translators mostly use transposition intuitively while
looking for ways to transfer the ST into the TT.