German modal particles – from lice in the fur of our language to manifestations of translators' styles

Abstract

The present paper comprises a study of how the German word class of modal particles can be indicative of translator style. German modal particles as a word class are described in detail and I take stock of the research on this linguistic feature that moved into the centre of researchers' interest in the late 1960s and continues to be a topic of controversial debate. I show how corpus methodologies are useful in the identification and analysis of modal particles and provide a case study based on an electronic corpus that consists of F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Beautiful and Damned and its two translations into German by Hans-Christian Oeser and Renate Orth-Guttmann, both published in 1998. A quantitative analysis reveals usage patterns of modal particles applied by each translator, as well as preferences of each translator for individual modal particles. A qualitative analysis with a focus on the modal particle wohl shows how it can be used to shift the point of view, explicitate the relationship between characters etc. and how these strategies affect the macrolevel of the translated novel.

Keywords:

• corpus methodologies
• German
• modal particles
• literary translation
• translator style

Notes

1. The concept of ‘homonymy’ is used here to signify that the same graphic and phonetic form has different functions in different word classes. (No distinction is made between polyfunctionality and homonymy.) Such a homonymic form may be polysemic, i.e. have different lexical meanings in each function.

2. Weydt (2001) attempts to identify modal particles across languages. However, this makes the issue of defining modal particles unnecessarily difficult – at least for present purposes – because even very basic criteria, such as the invariance of particles, cannot be applied anymore. Therefore, I keep a single-language perspective and all criteria mentioned in the present paper refer to particles in the German language, unless otherwise indicated.

3. Context is understood in the present study as the broader concept, referring to Firth's ‘context of situation’ on a textual and non-textual level, while co-text is understood as referring only to the immediate textual vicinity of a word (Kenny, 2001, p. 30).

4. Where examples are taken from The Beautiful and Damned or its translations, FSF stands for F. Scott Fitzgerald, HCO for Hans-Christian Oeser and ROG for Renate Orth-Guttmann. The paragraph numbering refers to the novel's aligned versions in electronic format.

5. Diewald (1997, p. 79) presents the following categories: adversative, augmentative, iterative, causal, confirmative, consecutive and restrictive.

6. A keyword list is created with Wordsmith Tools by comparing the frequency-ranked wordlist for one file against that for another. The result is a list of words (keywords), ranked according to their keyness, which are used to a considerably different extent in the first file compared to the second.

7. A back translation of the German versions of the examples presented in this section would result in the original version unless otherwise indicated; for German versions that include a modal particle, accompanied with the comment that the use of the modal particle makes the utterance more casual and less abrupt. In addition, a back translation is given in square brackets, where appropriate. However, in some cases there is no equivalent translation in English, such as for Example 3. Linguistic elements in the source text that triggered the use of a modal particle (or another modal element) are highlighted in bold print.

8. Etwa occurs in yes/no questions and has the semantic meaning of surprise (Weinrich, 1993). The surprise can be positive or negative. It also expresses the speaker's expectation (König, 1977). König (1977, p. 126) points out that the expected answer – which is negative in a positive question and positive in a negated question – is not related to the likelihood of fulfilment but to the attitude of the speaker. If the answer does not match this pattern, the expectations of the speaker are not fulfilled and the question then is a reproach.

9. For the concept of narrative point of view see Simpson (1993), for a model of narrator types see Fowler (1996), and for a model of speech and thought presentation see Leech and Short (1981) and Semino and Short (2004).

10. The original paper was published in 1939. It was translated into English by Konnosuke Ezawa and appeared in Weydt (1977).