Sententiality and translation strategies German-Norwegian

A scale of desententialization proposed by Christian Lehmann (1984), on which the possible expressions of a proposition are ranged from a finite clause at the sentential pole to a verbal noun at the nominal pole, is applied to the problems of translation from German to Norwegian. In light of pilot studies showing that Norwegian is more sentential than German, it is hypothesized that the translation of nonfictional German prose into Norwegian requires movement toward the sentential pole of the scale. The hypothesis is supported by a comparison of 30 such German texts with their published Norwegian texts. Clause-formation strategies used in the corpora to convert a German nominal structure to a sentential one in Norwegian include the transformation of nonfinite verb forms & nominalizations into finite verbs & the use of supplementary verbs not traceable to the source text to create finite clauses from single-clause constituents, coordinated or elliptical structures, & attributes. 29 References. Adapted from the source document