“I’M TELLIN’ YEH, YER WRONG! SAID HAGRID HOTLY.’ – EXPLICITATION IN THE TRANSLATION OF COMPLEX QUOTATIVES WITH ATTITUDE ADVERBS
“I’M TELLIN’ YEH, YER WRONG! SAID HAGRID HOTLY.’ – EXPLICITATION IN THE TRANSLATION OF COMPLEX QUOTATIVES WITH ATTITUDE ADVERBS

Summary/Abstract: The aim of the present paper is to investigate the translation of a stylistic pattern recurrent in a literary text such as J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone: complex quotatives made up of a verbum dicendi and an attitude adverb. We start from considerations regarding frequency of literal/non-literal uses of a subtype of manner adverbs (Killie, 2007) and their equivalent forms in translation. We take a unified view of this type of adverbs as being derived from a common root (a base adjective with a stative meaning) whose meaning (literal or non-literal) depends on the predicates they modify. This approach allows us to better investigate possible mismatches in translation between literal/non-literal readings and the main strategies of translating these adverbs from English to Romanian and French. Our initial prediction was that Romanian and French would employ different strategies in translation, which can be explained by parametric variation: while French and English qualify as adverbial languages in the line of Swan (1997), Romanian behaves as a partly adverbial language (Protopopescu, 2011). This means that Romanian tends to make use of explicitation to a larger extent than French. However, our prediction was not confirmed: contrary to expectations, it turns out that the French translation makes use of explicitation to a larger extent than the Romanian. This might be a result of the fact that, as previously argued (Vișan, 2022), English quotatives tend to be explicitated in literary translation irrespective of the target language employed.

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