What it is
Negation of the opposite expresses a proposition by naming its contrary and negating it, or by removing a negation from the source and naming the contrary outright. The situation described does not move; the polarity of the wording does. The operation runs in both directions: a negated source expression may become an affirmative target expression, and an affirmative source expression may become a negated one where the target convention takes the indirect route.
Vinay and Darbelnet recorded it as one of the subtypes of modulation, the litotes case. Newmark, working through their inventory, observed that most of the modulation types they listed had already hardened into dictionary equivalents and therefore no longer represent a decision; he singled out the negated contrary as the one type that remains genuinely productive for a translator. Chesterman describes the same operation from another angle: his semantic strategy S2, antonymy, is the selection of an antonym together with a negation element, which is the mirror image of the same move.
Because it is a modulation subtype, the general cautions on the modulation record apply here as well. One boundary is worth holding: converses reverse the argument roles of a predicate, as in buy and sell, and leave polarity alone, whereas negation of the opposite leaves the roles alone and works on polarity.
When it applies
- The source language uses litotes as an unmarked register while the target language marks it, so a literal double negative misreports the tone.
- The target language has a single positive term where the source has a negated phrase, or a single negative term where the source negates a positive one.
- A literal rendering would stack negations in the target clause, at which point the reader has to compute the polarity rather than read it.
Examples
FR>EN
- Source: Ce n'est pas difficile à comprendre.
- Target: It is easy to understand.
- Comment: The standard illustration. The negated form is the ordinary French way of saying this, whereas English "not difficult" reads as a concession granted against expectation. Preserving the negation preserves a shade the source does not carry.
DE>EN
- Source: Solche Fälle sind nicht selten.
- Target: Such cases are common.
- Comment: German litotes is a live and neutral register. The affirmative English rendering matches the frequency claim; "not rare" would read as a deliberate understatement and invite the reader to ask what is being conceded.
NL>EN
- Source: Hij was niet ontevreden met het resultaat.
- Target: He was reasonably pleased with the result.
- Comment: Here the hedge is real and has to survive. "He was pleased" flips the polarity but discards the reserve, which in an appraisal or a report is part of what was said. The target keeps the guarded reading while dropping the double negative.
Watch out for
The logical constraint is the one most often ignored. An antonymic pair may be contradictory, exhausting the field between them, or merely contrary, leaving a middle ground. Gradable adjectives are contraries: not hot does not entail cold, and not satisfied does not entail dissatisfied. Flipping a negated gradable adjective to its positive antonym silently removes the middle ground the source left open.
- Litotes is frequently a hedge or a courtesy. Removing the negation removes the understatement, which is a change of tone and sometimes of the degree of commitment the writer accepted.
- Check what the negation governs before reversing it. In text with quantifiers, conditions and exceptions, not all is not none, and the scope of the negative is often the operative question.
- In binding text the polarity of an obligation is substantive. A prohibition restated as a conditional permission, or an exclusion restated as a positive restriction, alters the norm even where the truth conditions appear to match.
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, pp. 30–39.
- Newmark, P. (1988). A Textbook of Translation. London: Prentice Hall, pp. 88–89.
- Chesterman, A. (1997). Memes of Translation: The Spread of Ideas in Translation Theory. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Revised edition 2016, Ch. 4.