Stylistic normalisation, convergence and cross-linguistic interference in translation: The case of the Czech transgressive

Olga Nádvorníková

Abstract:

The Czech transgressive is a non-finite verb form belonging to the cross-linguistic
converb category. In contrast with other converbs (e.g. Romance gerundio or the
Russian деепричастие), the Czech transgressive has a strong stylistic mark and
is very rare in contemporary language. Using a parallel (multilingual) corpus and
a comparable corpus of translated and non-translated Czech, the paper investigates
the differences in the frequency of the transgressive in translated and nontranslated
fiction and non-fiction. The data show the effect of stylistic normalisation
in fiction, but not in non-fiction. The results of the potential effect of crosslinguistic
interference are less conclusive, indicating that a thorough contrastive
analysis of different language pairs is required first. Finally, the effect of convergence
was observed neither in fiction nor in non-fiction.