Vanakreeka partitsiibi tõlkimine saksa, prantsuse ja eesti keelde: kontrastiivne analüüs
Date
2014-09-19
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Tartu Ülikool
Abstract
The title of this Master‟s thesis is The Translation of Ancient Greek Participles into German, French and Estonian: A Contrastive Analysis. The original idea for this study comes from the personal sense of great discrepancy existing between the use of the participle in Ancient Greek and modern languages. Comprehending the use and function of the participle is perhaps one of the biggest challenges in studying Ancient Greek, hence an in-depth analysis into the translation of the Ancient Greek participle would provide an ample source of examples, how it has done in already pre-existing translations. The choice of adding German and French, next to my native Estonian, to the analysis was linguistically-motivated, and one of main points of interest for this thesis has is to look, how linguistically different languages deal with this problem. The initial hypothesis was that French, being a primarily analytic language (thus furthest apart from Ancient Greek in linguistic properties), would have greatest difficulties in conveying the original form of the Ancient Greek participle, whereas Estonian, a primarily synthetic language, would find it easiest.
The corpus comprises of 300 Ancient Greek participles from three different classical authors. The sources of the participle are the fourth book of The Histories by Herodotus, Second Philippic by Demosthenes, and Phaedrus by Plato. Upon compiling the corpus, two principles were used: firstly that each source text would be of a different genre (thus the corpus consists historical narrative, a public speech and a philosophical dialogue); and secondly that the translations into target language would have a different author every time, yet more or less remain to the same time period. For Herodotus, I use the translation of Theodor Braun in German (1958), Philippe-Ernest Legrand in French (1945) and Astrid Kurismaa in Estonian (1983); for Demosthenes, the translation of Wolfhart Unte in German (1985), Maurice Croiset in French (1925) and Janika Päll in Estonian (2006); for Plato, a rework of Schleiermacher's translation in German (1953), translation of Leon Rubin in French (1961) and Marju Lepajõe in Estonian (2003).
Following the introduction, this paper is structured into four parts – 1) general properties of the participle, both in Ancient Greek as well as in the target languages, 2) methodology of the study, 3) analysis of the corpus and 4) conclusion. The full corpus has been added as appendixes for future reference.
On the general properties of the participle it was revealed that the definition of the participle largely depended on the source language of the definition as the concept would always be explained via source language examples. Still, certain general properties can be discerned – an non-finite verb form with the functionality of an adjective that nonetheless retains some characteristics of the verb (in example: the possibility to take an object, the expression of aspect and voice, etc). Another universal characteristic is its complete productivity – any verb can be made into a participle.
Ancient Greek has morphologically distinct participial forms in four different tenses – the present, future, aorist and perfect. It also expresses the category of voice, as there exists a morphological difference between active, medial and passive voice (in several tenses, the two latter voices form a combined medio-passive voice). The grammar books on Ancient Greek offer many different approaches to the syntactical function of the participle. The categorisation used in this paper is largely based on William Goodwin's A Greek Grammar which makes a distinction between three major uses of the participle – attributive, circumstantial and supplementary use. In
staying true to modern terminology, I have replaced “circumstantial” with “adverbial” and “supplementary” with “predicative” use of the participle. Other grammar books were also consulted – Bronemann and Risch's Griechische Grammar in German; Lukinovich and Rousset's Grammaire de Grec Ancien and Bertrand's Nouvelle Grammaire Grecque in French – and a brief compendium on the different approaches has been included. Keeping in mind the actual occurrence of participial uses and the translation techniques applied, I made certain adoptions to Goodwin's system – thus in the analysis of part three, there is an additional distinction between the substantive use of the participle (a subcategory of attributive participle, according to most grammar books) and genitivus absolutus (a subcategory of circumstantial/adverbial participle according to Goodwin).
All three target languages have two morphologically distinct participial forms – the present and part participial form. Estonian participle also expresses the category of voice which does not exist as a morphologically distinct form in German and French. The main difference in the syntactic use of the participle between Ancient Greek and target languages lies in its predicative use, as one of the main uses of the participle in modern languages is predicative as a part of compound tenses. Yet Ancient Greek seldom employs compound tenses. Another problem lay in finding a modern-language counterpart for the adverbial use which was not that explicitly present in target language grammars. Arrivé et al in La grammaire d’aujourd’hui makes use of the term "apposition" and this term was used in the subsequent analysis to express target language participial use equivalent to Ancient Greek adverbial use. Attributive use was largely unchanged, although various limitations did exist in target languages individually.
A brief glance was also necessary to the concept of non-finite verb forms in general, as other non-finite verb forms would sometimes an equal value to the participle in the quantitative analysis. This includes the gerundive forms in Estonian and French and infinitive forms in all three target languages.
The methodology of this paper employs a combination of qualitative and quantitative analysis – the qualitative analysis describes the translation techniques of every participle in all three languages. The general techniques were: translation with a participle; translation with other non-finite verb forms; translation with an adjective; translation with a noun (phrase); translation with a clause; and omission. Each technique also had its set of subcategories: for instance, a participle could be an attribute, substantive or an apposition; a noun phrase could be described as simple or complex etc. One of the key principles in describing the translations was an attempt to limit the description to the translation of the participle exclusively – for example, if the original participle functioned as a substantive and also had a complement, the translation of the complement was not described.
The quantitative analysis is based on Eugene Nida‟s concepts of formal and dynamic equivalence and this paper attempts to measure the relation of every translation to these two concepts from the perspective of grammatic accuracy. Two separate criteria are observed in this analysis – does the translation retain the original word class and the original syntactic structure? To properly measure this, I created a five-point grading system, where the lowest value would be grammatically most accurate. Thus a 1 point translation retains both the original word form and syntactical structure, 2 point translation changes either the word class or the syntactic structure, 3 point translation changes both the word class and the syntactic structure, 4 point translation creates a new clause, 5 point translation omits the participle. The word class is retained only if the translation uses a non-finite verb form. The syntactic structure depends on the original category of the participle – a substantive participle can syntactically either the subject, object, indirect
object or adverbial; the attributive participle can only be a compound; the adverbial and predicative participle and genitivus absolutus can only be an apposition. A series of examples have been added to illustrate this grading system.
The results of the quantitative analysis revealed the initial hypothesis to be largely incorrect – contrarily to the hypothesis, it was French that proved to be grammatically closest to the original (overall value of 3 points on the grading system), followed by Estonian (3.12 points) and German (3.36). It is remarkable, however, that in terms of separate texts, the ranking of the languages' was different in every occasion – thus for Herodotus the ranking was French (2.99), Estonian (3.69), German (3.85); for Demosthenes Estonian (2.76), French (3.13), German (3.4); and for Plato German (2.59); Estonian (2.83); French (3.02). Although certain tendencies did seem to be language-specific (for instance, French always had a relatively low score in the category of adverbial participles and German in the category of substantive participle), the formal characteristics of the language were far outweighed by the decisions of the translator. There did exist an interesting correlation between the genre of the text and the grammatical accuracy of the translation – in almost all of the categories, the translations of Plato's philosophical dialogue were closer to the original, whereas historical narrative of Herodotus warranted a looser approach. Whether this is sheer coincidence or a more general trend, would require further study.
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Keywords
tõlkimine, kõrvutav lingvistika