Individual variation between translators in the use of clause building and clause reduction

Abstract

Recent years have seen an increasing interest in translators’ voices as manifested in their writing style. The present study is an investigation of differences in the use of clause building and clause reduction, which has not so far been investigated in any depth with regard to individual variation. The findings show that translators have distinct styles both with respect to how closely they follow the source text and in the structures they prefer when they introduce changes. The study also demonstrates the importance of analysing changes in context, as translators may be forced to perform syntactic changes that are in principle optional because they have made certain choices in other places of the text. Finally, the study emphasizes the advantage of corpora comprising multiple translations of the same source text.