The parameter
Every language can express that one event is subordinate to another: that it was the reason, the condition, the purpose or the content of the other. Languages differ in the machinery. One strategy keeps the dependent clause looking like an independent one, with a verb inflected for tense and person, and marks the dependency with a conjunction. The other reduces the verb to a form that could not stand alone: a nominalization, a participle, an infinitive, a converb.
Typologists describe the difference as balanced against deranked. A balanced verb form is one that could occur in an independent declarative clause; a deranked form is structurally different, lacking some of the usual verbal distinctions or carrying nominalizing or case material instead. Cristofaro's WALS chapter on purpose clauses reports 102 deranked against 38 balanced in a sample of 170 languages, with 30 using both. Deranking is the commoner arrangement worldwide, and the finite subordinate clause European translators treat as the norm is a regional preference rather than a default.
The strategies are not mutually exclusive. English has finite that clauses and non-finite infinitival ones, but the non-finite ones are shallow: they carry no subject marking and no full tense system. Turkish nominalized clauses carry both.
How languages vary
- Finite subordinate clauses: a conjunction plus a fully inflected verb. Dominant in English, Dutch, German, French, Spanish and Greek.
- Nominalized clauses: the verb becomes a noun-like form taking possessive and case endings. Turkish with its -DIK and -mA forms, Japanese and Korean with comparable devices, Basque, Quechua.
- Converbs: dedicated non-finite forms marking an adverbial relation to the main verb, chainable at length. Turkish, Mongolian, Japanese, and productively in Russian and Polish through adverbial participles.
- Serial verbs: two or more verbs in one clause with no linking element and a single tense specification. Akan, Ewe, Yoruba, and many languages of Southeast Asia and Melanesia.
Most languages use more than one, and the value names the preferred strategy for connected prose. Russian and Polish use adverbial participles freely in written registers and rarely in speech, so the value shifts with text type inside a single language.
Consequences for translation
Where the two languages of a pair prefer different strategies, subordination becomes the most frequent obligatory transposition in the whole job. A Turkish nominalization has to become an English finite clause with a conjunction, because English has no equivalent form: the verb changes class and the clause changes rank, and neither change is a matter of taste. That is transposition and unit shift together, and where the recutting moves clause boundaries it is a clause structure change as well.
Expanding a non-finite form into a finite clause also requires information the source did not carry. A converb has no tense of its own; a nominalization may leave the subject unstated. The English clause needs a subject, a tense and often a modal. Usually the material is recoverable and supplying it is explicitation rather than invention; sometimes it is not, and the translator has quietly resolved something the source left open.
Two practical consequences follow. Sentence counts stop matching, because a Turkish or Japanese sentence built from a chain of converbs and one final finite verb corresponds to two, three or four English sentences. Segment alignment then contains one-to-many pairs, so sentence-level matching returns less than it does within a family, and a reviser counting sentences will find mismatches that are not errors. And explicit connectives replace implicit relations: a converb chain leaves the relation between its links unstated, while English prefers to name it with after, because or while. Choosing the connective is an interpretive act carried out under grammatical pressure, and where a document argues the choice should be consistent.
Examples
TR>EN
- Source: Toplantıya katılamayacağını bildirdi.
- Target: He informed us that he would not be able to attend the meeting.
- Comment: One Turkish nominalized form carries negation, ability, future reference, the subject and accusative case. English needs a finite that clause, and with it a subject pronoun, a tense and a modal. The source names no addressee, so us is supplied.
RU>EN
- Source: Подписав договор, он вышел из зала.
- Target: After signing the contract, he left the room.
- Comment: The Russian adverbial participle marks aspect but neither tense nor subject, and leaves its relation to the main clause unstated. English keeps a non-finite form but must choose a preposition naming that relation, and after is a commitment the source did not make.
EN>TR
- Source: Because he did not come, we were unable to start.
- Target: Gelmediği için başlayamadık.
- Comment: The reverse direction compresses: the conjunction and finite verb collapse into a nominalized form plus a postposition, and the second clause becomes one word.
References
- Cristofaro, S. (2003). Subordination. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
- Cristofaro, S. (2013). "Purpose Clauses." In Dryer, M. S. & Haspelmath, M. (eds.), The World Atlas of Language Structures Online, Ch. 125. Leipzig: Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology.
- Haspelmath, M. & König, E. (eds.) (1995). Converbs in Cross-Linguistic Perspective. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
- Comrie, B. (1989). Language Universals and Linguistic Typology, 2nd edition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, Ch. 7.
- Velupillai, V. (2012). An Introduction to Linguistic Typology. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, Ch. 12.