Modal Particles as a Translation Problem. Contrastive Analysis of German Modal Particle ja

Modal Particles as a Translation Problem. Contrastive Analysis of German Modal Particle ja

Mesic, Sanela

Modal particles are considered as a translating problem, especially when it comes to translation in a language whit a lesser extent of modal particles. The most important thing in the process of translation is to transfer the meaning of an utterance using the adequate language resources of the language being translated into. There are few absolute equivalents in two different languages. I presume that two utterances in two different languages are equivalent if they have the same semantic-pragmatic function without having the same formal-syntactic structure. It is unnecessary to translate each modal particle. Such a translation could be considered as an unnatural one. In order to transfer such a subtle distinction from the German language into some other language we often have to use the method of paraphrasing. The issues observed in this paper are related to the transfer of modality in general, as well as to the translation of the modal particles. Modal particles express an epistemic modality. My intention in this paper is to expose, on the examples of the German particle ja, in what extent the epistemic modality remains within the Bosnian translation. The observed examples are excerpted from five German literary works and their equivalent Bosnian translations.

Conference or Workshop Item
PeerReviewed

2012

981