Translation Procedures Accompanying Phrasemes in the “Gray Rhino”

Abstract

This research aims to investigate the translation procedures accompanying phrasemes, as few studies have been published on the subject. I focused my research on a book written in a very popular genre today. Because of their colloquial styles, self-help books today sell in large numbers and reach a wide range of readers. One reason may be that authors (and, therefore, translators) use phraseology in many cases in the text.

For the analysis, Michele Wucker’s “The Gray Rhino – Why We Keep Missing the Most Obvious Threats and How We Can Get Out of Their Way” and its Hungarian translation were chosen. I used contrastive text analysis to analyse the English source text and the Hungarian target texts (unrevised and revised version): after analysing the source text, I compared it with the unrevised target text and later, as a third step, the already revised target text with the previous two texts. I identified four main phraseme-matching procedures: use of equivalence, circumlocution, omission and creative solution. In looking for these procedures, I sought to find out which procedures were preferred and which were least preferred by the translators. Going one step further, I also looked at whether the revisor approved or overruled the translator’s decision, thus also seeking to identify and formulate revisor phraseme-matching operations.

I summarised my results in a table (a small database). I have illustrated with graphs and quantified what happened to the phrasemes in the source text, the unrevised target text and the revised target text. The phrasemes highlighted with context from each work are referred to as linguistic examples.

I have found that both national and international researchers agree that constructing a comprehensive characterisation of phrasemes is an extremely difficult task. Several attempts have been made to define a phraseme, but defining it is as challenging as defining exactly where the boundary between phraseme and non-phraseme lies. Categorising phrases is just as difficult. On the basis of the researchers’ opinions, I have found that there is no clear boundary between groups of fixed phrases; it is not clear that a given phrase can be, for example, definitely a saying or a proverb.

The important conclusion of the study is that the knowledge and use of translation techniques imply that this skill needs to be constantly updated due to the slow but constant change of languages. This means that knowledge of the latest, fashionable words and linguistic turns (and their varied occurrences, for example, the ‘modernisation’ of a saying) is a minimum requirement in the translation process. In the future, more far-reaching conclusions could be drawn by examining a larger corpus to provide an even more nuanced picture of the correspondence of phrasemes.