A midweek quickie. Yesterday on Facebook, a posting from Thorstein Fretheim (Professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, specializing in pragmatics and semantics: intonation, discourse markers, prosody, context), as it came to me in English translation:
‘Trondheim’s Own Chocolate Factory’ (Address Newspaper) or ‘Trondheim’s Own Chocolate Factory?’
(Address is the regional newspaper in Trondheim)
Now this was utterly baffling, so I asked for the Norwegian original:
‘Trondheims egne sjokoladefabrikk’ (Adresseavisa) eller ‘Trondheims egen sjokoladefabrikk’?
Ah! My response (somewhat edited here):
— This came to me in English translation — ‘Trondheim’s Own Chocolate Factory’ or ‘Trondheim’s Own Chocolate Factory?’* — so the question (egne, as it appeared in the paper, or egen?) definitely gets lost in translation. The deeper point is that real translation requires that the translator appreciate the writer’s intentions, not just convert the words of the text into another language. (*In fact, it’s more idiotic than that, because the translator mechanically enforces the puncquote order in English (‘Trondheim’s Own Chocolate Factory?’) when only the quotepunc order (as in the Norwegian original) makes sense.)
But wait! It’s more complicated than that, as TF explained to me this morning:
It’s not just that. Like English own, egen as determiner cannot occur in definite NPs corresponding to *the own N and *that own N, nor in indefinites corresponding to *an own N or *some own Ns. It only appears in possessives: his/their/my neighbor’s N. These constraints on egen are absent from Swedish syntax. Swedish den egna produktionen refers to someone’s production. The semantic relationship between the verb meaning ‘own’ and the determiner is clear. (That verb is eie in Norwegian and äga in Swedish.)
Leave a Reply