What it is
A chassé-croisé is a double transposition: two elements of the source expression change grammatical class and change places with each other at the same time. The information is fully preserved, but it is redistributed across the sentence in mirror image. What the source carries in the verb the target carries in a satellite, and what the source carries in a satellite the target carries in the verb.
The label is Vinay and Darbelnet's own, confirmed in their glossary of terms, and they reserved it for exactly this crossed pattern rather than for any pair of transpositions occurring together. The type case is a movement expression. English, and Germanic languages generally, put the manner of motion in the verb and the path in a particle or preposition; French, and Romance languages generally, put the path in the verb and the manner in an adverbial. Translating between the two therefore requires both elements to move. Later typological work described the same asymmetry as the contrast between satellite-framed and verb-framed languages, which is why the pattern is so regular that it can be anticipated rather than discovered.
Chassé-croisé is not a separate procedure from transposition so much as a named configuration of it. It earns its own entry because the crossing is what makes it diagnostic: a translator who moves only one of the two elements produces either a sentence that loses the manner or a sentence that loses the path, and both losses are silent.
When it applies
- The source expresses motion or a change of state with a manner verb plus a directional particle, and the target lexicalizes direction in the verb.
- The reverse case: a source path verb accompanied by a manner adverbial, where the target has a manner verb and a directional particle available.
- The pattern generalizes beyond motion to causation and result, where one language puts the process in the verb and the result in a complement.
- Two elements are involved, not one. Where only the verb has to move, the case is a simple transposition.
Examples
FR>EN
- Source: Il a traversé la rivière à la nage.
- Target: He swam across the river.
- Comment: The standard illustration and Vinay and Darbelnet's own type case. The French verb carries the path and the adverbial carries the manner; in English the two exchange roles and positions. "He crossed the river by swimming" preserves the French arrangement and reads as a translation.
EN>FR
- Source: She ran up the stairs.
- Target: Elle a monté l'escalier en courant.
- Comment: The same crossing in the other direction. French has no ordinary verb meaning "to go up by running", so the manner is demoted to a gerund and the path is promoted to the verb. The operation is obligatory, not stylistic.
ES>EN
- Source: Salió corriendo de la casa.
- Target: He ran out of the house.
- Comment: Spanish behaves like French: salir carries the path, the gerund carries the manner. The English particle "out" takes over the path, freeing the verb for the manner. Rendering the Spanish as "He left the house running" keeps every element and still misplaces the emphasis.
Watch out for
The characteristic failure is the half chassé-croisé, in which the verb is transposed and the second element is quietly dropped. The result is grammatical, idiomatic and incomplete, which makes it hard to catch in a target-only read. A reviser comparing texts should count both elements.
- Where the target has no economical way to express the manner, the translator may have to accept a heavier adverbial or an explicit loss. That is a reduction and should be recorded as one, not filed under this heading.
- Manner is sometimes evidence rather than colour. In witness statements, accident reports and medical records, how a movement was performed can be the contested fact, so dropping it for fluency is a substantive change.
- Not every verb plus particle invites the pattern. Phrasal verbs whose meaning is idiomatic rather than compositional are handled as fixed units, and analyzing them into manner and path yields nonsense.
References
- Vinay, J.-P. & Darbelnet, J. (1958). Stylistique comparée du français et de l'anglais: méthode de traduction. Paris: Didier. English translation by J. C. Sager & M.-J. Hamel (1995), Comparative Stylistics of French and English: A Methodology for Translation, Benjamins Translation Library 11. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
- Talmy, L. (1985). "Lexicalization patterns: semantic structure in lexical forms." In T. Shopen (ed.), Language Typology and Syntactic Description, Vol. 3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 57–149.