Translation shifts from English to Romanian in literary and general informative texts

Abstract

This thesis asks the question of how English present and past participles are translated to Romanian in literary texts, as well as in general informative texts. Excerpts containing present and past participles are extracted from the Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows book and Wikipedia texts and compared to their equivalents in Romanian. The theoretical background is based on J.C. Catford’s translation shifts classification. The most frequent changes are level shifts (a grammatical distinction in the source language is expressed by lexical means in the target language), class shifts (English participles are translated to different grammatical items - e.g., an English present participle can be translated to a Romanian gerund, a relative clause, or a noun phrase), or unit shifts (changes that, in this case, occur at the phrase level). The aims of the project include differences in shift patterns depending on the genre (a literary text vs. a general informative text), as well as additional observations that concern miscellaneous cases of translation shifts, and differences between optional and obligatory changes