Translating lexical negative polarity items
Translating lexical negative polarity items

Summary/Abstract: The aim of the present paper is twofold: on the one hand to broadly point out how English and Romanian differ in terms of the (im)possibility of having multiple instances of negative constituents in a sentence, and thus we talk about a Strict-Negative-Concord language, like Romanian, and a Double-Negation language, like English; while, on the other hand, the second aim of the paper is to investigate whether these multiple occurrences of negative constituents in Romanian sentences cause native speakers any difficulties when translating from English into Romanian or from Romanian into English, and if it is important to have a good command of grammatical structures. We will also look at translating mechanisms and creative strategies that second-year students resorted to in order to offer renditions when being assigned a translation task. The paper concludes that translators’ main goal need not be general understandability as they might distort the source-language text in such a way that readers of the translation will not be able to grasp all the nuances of the original text.

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