What it is
A structure shift is a change in the ordered arrangement of the elements that make up a unit: in a clause, the subject, predicator, complement and adjunct; in a group, the head and its modifiers. The same elements are present on both sides, and they are configured differently.
Catford identified structure shifts as the most frequent of the shift types and noted that they occur at every rank, not only in the clause. His standard illustration is the pair formed by English "I like jazz" and Spanish "me gusta el jazz": both clauses report one state of affairs, but the entity liked is the subject in Spanish and the object in English, while the person doing the liking is the subject in English and an indirect object in Spanish. The elements have not been added to or removed; their assignment to clause functions has changed.
Chesterman covers much of the same territory in his strategy G6, clause structure change. The two frameworks describe the same event from opposite starting points. Catford is describing a relation between two language systems, observed after the fact and largely obligatory; Chesterman is describing something a translator does, listed among the options available. Where the target grammar leaves no choice, the description in Catford's terms is the more informative one; where the translator selects among permitted orders, Chesterman's framing fits better. A record of the decision should say which of the two situations obtained.
When it applies
- Basic constituent order differs between the languages, as with verb-final source structures against verb-medial target structures.
- Verb placement is governed by clause type, as in the second-position and clause-final rules of German subordination.
- Experiencer constructions assign the participants to different clause functions, so the roles have to be redistributed rather than reordered.
- Modification runs in the opposite direction inside the group, with premodification answering postmodification.
Examples
ES>EN
- Source: Me gusta el jazz.
- Target: I like jazz.
- Comment: The standard illustration. Nothing here can be preserved: Spanish grammar makes the thing liked the subject, English grammar makes the person the subject, and the shift is fully obligatory. It is a useful case precisely because no judgement is involved.
TR>EN
- Source: Mahkeme kararı bugün açıkladı.
- Target: The court announced the decision today.
- Comment: Turkish places the verb last and the adjunct before it; English places the verb second and the adjunct at the end. The elements correspond one to one, so the shift is purely configurational.
DE>EN
- Source: ..., weil er den Vertrag nicht unterschrieben hat.
- Target: ... because he has not signed the contract.
- Comment: German subordination closes the clause with the finite verb and separates it from its participle; English keeps the verb group together after the subject. The negation also travels, which is the detail most often missed in long subordinate chains.
Watch out for
Structure shifts are usually obligatory, which makes them look risk-free. Two things travel with the reordering and need checking.
- Information structure. Restoring canonical target order can move what was thematic in the source into the middle of the target sentence. The result is a grammatically necessary structure shift accompanied by an unintended emphasis change, and only the second of the two is a decision.
- Scope. Order carries interpretation in enumerations, provisos and qualifying phrases. A qualifier standing at the end of a source list may attach to the whole list or to its last member; target word order will often force one reading and close the ambiguity the source preserved. In binding text that is a substantive act, and it belongs in a translator's note rather than in silence.
A third, milder caution: because structure shifts are so frequent, they are worth recording only where they interact with emphasis or scope. Logging every reordering between a verb-final and a verb-medial language produces a document nobody will read.
References
- Catford, J. C. (1965). A Linguistic Theory of Translation: An Essay in Applied Linguistics. London: Oxford University Press, p. 77.
- Chesterman, A. (1997). Memes of Translation: The Spread of Ideas in Translation Theory. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Revised edition 2016, Ch. 4.