On the translation of the infinitive clauses introduced by a perception verb
De l'infinitive de perception dans la pratique traductologique
Résumé
The subject of the study are the infinitive subordinate clauses (ICP). These infinitive structures, introduced by a perception verb like "voir" (‘see’), "regarder" (‘watch’), "entendre" (‘hear’), "écouter" (‘listen’) and "sentir" (‘smell’), are composed of two complements: a noun phrase and a verb infinitive ("j’entends les oiseaux chanter" ‘I hear birds sing’). We are interested in ICP in a French-Polish traductological perspective. As this structure, so widespread in French, is not to be found in Polish, this Slavic language offers at least eight different ways of translating it (observed in the corpora), the most frequent of which turns out to be the "jak" P (‘as P’) structure (*"słyszę ptaki śpiewać/śpiewać ptaki" ‘I hear birds sing/I hear sing birds’; "słyszę, jak ptaki śpiewają/śpiewają ptaki", literally ‘I hear as birds sing/sing birds’). Even though we regularly come across this linguistic phenomenon in our profession (we teach French to Polish bachelor students), there is one basic issue that intrigues us: how do the translators choose one of the eight available structures in their native language? Are their choices random, or lingustically constrained? To answer this thorny question, we have decided to adopt as a theoretical framework (adapting them to ICP) the research tools proposed by Professor Eugeniusz Ucherek (University of Wrocław, Poland, 1982), who originally constituted a method of contrastive French-Polish analysis of prepositions.
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