Andrea Götz

The woman, the man, the girl, the boy: Linguistic contrast and explicitation in personal reference

The goal of this presentation is to show that research into the practical, as well as the theoretical side of translation is crucial for the well-rounded training of translators. For this, the presentation discusses the issues of personal reference in the English to Hungarian translation direction. More specifically, it investigates the combined effect of cross-linguistic contrast and explicitation on the Hungarian translation solutions for the gendered pronouns he and she. Frequently, genderedronouns produce the explicit Hungarian solutions the girl, the woman (’a lány’, ’a nő’) and the boy, the man (’a fiú’, a ’férfi’). Although the issue of translating gendered pronouns may not be perceived to present a difficult problem, comparative analyses show that these explicit forms, functioning as personal reference, are more frequent in translated Hungarian texts than in non-translated Hungarian texts. The presentation also addresses how translated Hungarian texts can avoid the overuse of certain forms of reference in order to resemble the personal reference of non-translated Hungarian texts more closely. The analyses are carried out on translated and non-translated fiction from the Pannonia Corpus. The presentation also introduces how corpus-based translation studies can offer practical help to trainee translators. Not only can translation research inform translator training, corpus research tools can be used to inform the work of trainee and trained translators alike.