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This is a contribution from Multilingual Discourse Production. Diachronic and Synchronic Perspectives. Edited by Svenja Kranich, Viktor Becher, Steffen Höder and Juliane House. © 2011. John Benjamins Publishing Company This electronic file may not be altered in any way. The author(s) of this article is/are permitted to use this PDF file to generate printed copies to be used by way of offprints, for their personal use only. Permission is granted by the publishers to post this file on a closed server which is accessible to members (students and staff) only of the author’s/s’ institute, it is not permitted to post this PDF on the open internet. For any other use of this material prior written permission should be obtained from the publishers or through the Copyright Clearance Center (for USA: www.copyright.com). Please contact [email protected] or consult our website: www.benjamins.com Tables of Contents, abstracts and guidelines are available at www.benjamins.com

part i

Diachronic perspectives: Long-term changes

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© 2011. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved

A tentative typology of translation-induced language change Svenja Kranich, Viktor Becher & Steffen Höder

Hamburg University and Research Centre on Multilingualism Language contact through translation (LCTT) is a particular source of contact-induced language change. While investigations into individual scenarios have shown its importance, major works on language contact have largely neglected this type of language contact. In particular, no attempt has been made so far at establishing general principles and mechanisms for LCTT situations. This contribution presents a tentative typology for the study of LCTT and analyzes two different situations from that perspective, namely the contact between Latin and Old Swedish in the Middle Ages and between English and German today.

1.  Introduction This paper presents first results from an investigation into general principles ­governing language contact through translation. Translation constitutes a particular type of language contact, where the source language (SL) can have an influence on the recipient language (RL) as norms or structures are taken over in the process of translation. Sometimes these innovations remain limited to translated texts. At other times, they are gradually integrated into the repertoire of the RL in general or at least into the repertoire associated with a particular domain or genre (e.g. legal documents). Although this type of contact-induced change has by no means gone unnoticed in individual cases (cf. e.g. Blake 1992; Gottlieb 1999, 2005; Baumgarten 2007), no attempt has been made so far at establishing general principles and mechanisms governing it. Major works on language contact (e.g. Thomason & Kaufman 1988; van Coetsem 1988, 2000; Heine & Kuteva 2005; Matras & Sakel 2007; Matras 2007) either dedicate only a small portion of their work to contact through translation, mention it in passing or even completely ignore it. It is likely that this oversight has to do with the supremacy assigned to contact through direct, spoken interaction in contact studies, which can probably be related to the history of the field. While in 19th and earlier 20th century linguistic studies, standard languages were almost the sole subject of investigation, the

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 Svenja Kranich, Viktor Becher & Steffen Höder

i­ nterest in contact that arose in the 1950s (with influential works like Haugen 1950; Weinreich 1953) and gained in popularity in the subsequent decades cultivated a particular interest in what people actually did in their everyday interactions and how that impacted on language development. And of course, language contact in direct interaction represents an extremely fruitful field of study. However, the recent strong focus on oral contact has led to a situation where we know a good deal about general principles and mechanisms in language contact through spoken discourse, but where language contact through written discourse has been bypassed by the enormous advances in typological investigation of contact situations achieved in the last decades. Contact through written discourse has certainly not been completely ignored – in fact, many interesting investigations of individual contact scenarios bear witness to the contrary (see above, as well as e.g. Böttger & Bührig 2004; Musacchio 2005; Taylor 2005). Yet no general trends, no typology, not even an attempt at a borrowing scale or hierarchy of factors influencing the outcome of this type of contact situation, have been proposed. In the following, we will present some factors which can be suspected to have an impact on contact through written discourse, based on frameworks for the study of language contact and on insights from translation studies (Section 2). Section 3 suggests a tentative typology for the study of contact through translation. In Section 4, two different contact situations – the contact through translation between Latin and Old Swedish in the Middle Ages and between English and German today – will be analyzed in accordance with the proposed typology. The results of the comparison will be discussed in Section 5. Section 6 represents a summary and some cautious conclusions concerning general issues in language change through translation. 2.  Establishing factors relevant for language contact through translation 2.1  Insights gained from studies on language contact Studies on language contact, as has been pointed out in the introduction, do not investigate in detail the specific type of contact we are interested in here. However, a few predictions about contact through translation are made by Thomason & Kaufman (1988: 66, 78ff.), van Coetsem (2000) and Heine & Kuteva (2005) (cf. Kranich 2009a).1 In addition, it is possible to formulate some hypotheses about

.  The main ideas for the typology of translation-induced language change were first presented by Kranich (2009a) at the 19th International Conference on Historical Linguistics in Nijmegen. We are grateful to participants of the conference for insightful comments and

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A tentative typology of translation-induced language change 

language contact through translation (LCTT in the following) based on the general insights presented in these three works. The hypotheses presented in this section have been gathered in this way. The first three concern the possibility/likelihood of effects on the different linguistic domains (lexicon, syntax etc.) through LCTT; the following six refer to linguistic and social, political and historical facts that could have an impact on the outcome of a particular situation of LCTT.

(1) Lexical borrowing is more prominent than structural borrowing.

This represents a prediction based on Thomason & Kaufman’s (1988: 50) general borrowing scale. Thomason & Kaufman make the broad distinction between two types of contact situation: in the first type, the RL is maintained as the language of a speech community, while elements from the SL are borrowed; in the second type the speech community shifts away from the use of the SL and uses the RL instead, and in this process elements from the SL find their way into the RL. In the former case, lexical borrowing prevails, and only in rather intense contact situations of this type do we also get structural borrowing (mostly phonology and syntax, then also morphological elements). In the second type, shift-induced interference, structural borrowing is predominant (if changes occur at all) (cf. Thomason & Kaufman 1988: 35–146). Since a language must be rather robust (i.e. not in the process of being shifted away from by its speakers) for translatory activity to take place, we are definitely dealing with situations of the first type. Hence, we should expect lexical borrowing to be more common than structural borrowing. This hypothesis is strengthened by Matras’ (2007: 61) observation that in the sample of languages discussed in Matras & Sakel (2007), lexical borrowing is ubiquitous, while the languages vary greatly with respect to the amount of structural impact from other languages.

(2) Structural borrowing is limited to syntactic borrowing.

Thomason & Kaufman make one specific comment on language contact through written discourse. Discussing the type of changes to be expected in situations of language maintenance, they state that situations of language maintenance in their survey which led to lexical borrowing and some slight structural borrowing were often of the type where the SL is “a prestigious literary language, and in these cases the source language is often known to the borrowers primarily or only in its written form” (Thomason & Kaufman 1988: 66). They note that in this type of contact

v­ aluable discussions. We would further like to thank Donald Winford for his helpful comments during his stay in Hamburg as visiting scholar at the Research Centre on Multilingualism.

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 Svenja Kranich, Viktor Becher & Steffen Höder

situation, the only form of structural borrowing they were able to observe was ­syntactic, not morphological (and obviously not phonetic) in nature. This observation finds reflection in hypothesis (2). Again, Matras’ (2007: 61f.) borrowing hierarchy furnishes some support for this idea, as bound morphology is overall least likely to be affected by language contact.

(3) All linguistic domains (except phonology) can be affected in LCTT (i.e. lexicon, morphology, syntax and pragmatics).

This hypothesis is in obvious contradiction to hypothesis (2). It is based on van Coetsem’s (2000) discussion of language contact in situations of what he terms Neutralization. Neutralization occurs in those contact situations where none of the languages involved is dominant, i.e. where the bilingual speaker is (more or less) equally competent in both. One specific type of Neutralization is, as van Coetsem (2000: 93) explicitly states, contact through translation. According to van Coetsem, the kind of outcome of this type of contact is, contrary to contact situations where either SL or RL are dominant, almost impossible to predict. It is not limited to or even predominant in any particular linguistic domain, but can occur in all fields. Influential factors are extralinguistic, e.g. prestige and the degree of standardization (see hypothesis (7) below). To validate these first three hypotheses, we will classify contact-induced changes in the RL according to the linguistic domain they pertain to. The following hypotheses deal with diverse factors proposed in the literature which may have an effect on the degree of influence of the SL on the RL in LCTT. Hypotheses (4) and (5) deal with general characteristics of the languages involved, hypotheses (6) to (9) relate to extralinguistic factors.

(4) Structural borrowing mostly occurs where functional analogies can be established between SL and RL based on typological proximity.

This hypothesis is based on another observation made by Thomason & Kaufman (1988: 72) with reference to slight to moderate borrowing in language maintenance situations. They assume that in such cases “source-language features that fit well typologically with functionally analogous features in the borrowing language tend to be borrowed first”.

(5) Structural impact of the SL on the RL relies on the conceptualization of equivalence relations by bilingual speakers. There needs to be some sort of basis for the establishment of such equivalence relations (e.g. a partial semantic overlap).

At first glance, hypothesis (5), which is based on Heine & Kuteva’s (2005: 4) observation, may look like the twin sister of hypothesis (4). In fact, they are conceptually related, but there are differences. For Heine & Kuteva, the concept of functional

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A tentative typology of translation-induced language change 

equivalence is not closely connected to typological distance between languages. Rather, the question is whether speakers can identify a construction in one language as equivalent to a construction in the other language. This is also the prerequisite for ‘selective grammatical copying’ in language contact established by Johanson (2008: 67), who presents the following example: if a language has a word for ‘two’ which also functions as a bound dual marker, a bilingual speaker can take the word of another language in his repertoire meaning ‘two’ and start using it as a dual-marking suffix. The functional correspondence established in this way is not a product of typological proximity, but only of a conceptual extension of perceived equivalence.

(6) Additional factors influencing change through LCTT are the same as in contact situations in general (intensity of contact, length of contact, sociopolitical dominance, prestige, attitude).

One can assume that, in general, LCTT is not completely different in kind from other types of language contact, so that factors established as having an impact on the outcome of contact in general should also apply in our specific type. The list of factors presented in (6) takes up factors presented as relevant by Thomason & Kaufman (1988). According to Matras (2007: 68), it is in particular the intensity of contact that plays a role, while social prestige is only indirectly involved as a factor that licenses the overstepping of boundaries between the two codes (SL and RL).2

(7) The selection is determined by social factors, attitude, and the degree of establishment of norms, in other words, the degree of standardization of a language overall and of the particular genre of the translated texts.

This hypothesis is similar to (6), but the list of factors proposed as determinants is somewhat different. The list in (7) goes back to van Coetsem’s views on factors governing contact-induced change in situations of Neutralization. A further, important difference to Thomason & Kaufman’s views lies, of course, in the fact that for van Coetsem these are the only factors having an impact in the type of contact situation discussed here, with no restrictions on the outcome of contact with regard to linguistic domains involved. .  The main factor made out by Matras (2007) as influencing the outcome of language contact, next to the intensity of the contact, is functionality of the linguistic categories, with e.g. modal markers of obligation being more frequently borrowed than modal markers of possibility (Matras 2007: 45). However, the investigation of LCTT is, at this point, at too early a stage to make such fine-grained comparisons of functional categories possible, simply because the sample of language contact situations which we have been able to take into account is not large enough (here, only two contact situations are compared in detail; in Kranich (2009a), 19 language pairs of languages in contact through translation were considered).

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 Svenja Kranich, Viktor Becher & Steffen Höder



(8) The impact of the SL on the RL will be strongest when the RL community has no, or no commonly accepted, written standard.



(9) In a parallel way to (8), the lower the degree of standardization of a genre, the greater will be the likelihood of impact of SL conventions on the RL.

Hypothesis (8) is based on Heine & Kuteva’s (2005: 251) brief discussion of contact through translation, where they propose this idea. Hypothesis (9) is a further development of this idea inspired by previous work on the impact of English on German through translation (cf. e.g. Baumgarten 2008: 410; Becher, House & Kranich 2009: 146). 2.2  Insights gained from translation studies Translation studies show us firstly that translations are very diverse in kind. Part of this diversity can be related to what Hatim & Mason (1990: 16) have called the different “basic orientation of the translator”. A translator follows certain maxims. A general list of requirements for a successful translation would include that the translation should render the main ideas of the source text (ST), reflect the ST’s style and manner, produce a natural, easily readable target text (TT), and, furthermore, a TT that can produce a similar response in the TT audience as the ST did in its audience (cf. Hatim & Mason 1990: 15f.). Frequently situations occur where these aims cannot all be fulfilled. For instance, differences between SL and target language (TL) stylistic conventions may preclude that the TT both reflects the ST’s style and sounds natural and easy in the TL and produces a comparable reaction in the TT audience. A translator will then have to choose and aim either at formal equivalence between ST and TT or at functional/communicative equivalence. This broad division into two types of translations, those more oriented towards formal equivalence and those more oriented towards functional equivalence, can be found under different terms in all major general works on translation (e.g. Nida 1964; House 1997; Koller 2001). House (1997) calls the former type Overt Translations (since their status as translated texts is out in the open) and the latter type Covert Translations (since their status as translated texts is hidden by the adaptation to TL conventions). The basic orientation of a translator towards formal equivalence or functional equivalence will necessarily have an impact on the potential for change and variation introduced by translatory practice. Striving for formal equivalence will tend to produce more structural SL interference (or shining-through of SL properties, cf. Teich 2003: 145) than searching for the best communicative equivalent, since in such cases, conventions of the TL are consciously neglected in order to approximate the form of the ST as closely as possible. We will see how this has an impact on the two LCTT situations discussed in the case studies. The field of translation studies also produces certain insights which, rather than leading to new hypotheses, reinforce the ones we could formulate on the © 2011. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved



A tentative typology of translation-induced language change 

basis of general models of language contact. For instance, Toury (1995: 267–278) suggests that there are two ‘laws’ in translation: the Law of Growing Standardization, which says that when the TT is adapted to TL preferences, translators occasionally overshoot the mark, leading to an overuse of conventional features, and the Law of Interference, which says that SL properties can find their way into the TT. These are obviously counteracting forces, and Toury states that it is particularly in situations where the SL has high prestige and the TL has no widely recognized standard that the Law of Interference wins out. This is in accordance with observations by House, who notes that in translations aiming at communicative equivalence (i.e. Covert Translations), a ‘cultural filter’ is applied. By cultural filtering, the translator adapts the text to TL norms and communicative preferences. However, in cases where the SL has a very high prestige, the cultural filter may be applied to a lesser extent (cf. House 2007, forthc.). Other claims from translation studies do not only offer support for hypotheses adduced so far, but provide new food for thought. A number of studies by translation scholars have concentrated on the quest for ‘universals of translation’, i.e. inherent properties of translated texts that occur regardless of the SL and the TL involved and which consequently distinguish translations from comparable nontranslated texts. The translation universals most commonly assumed in the translation studies literature are: 1. Explicitation: “an overall tendency to spell things out rather than leave them implicit in translation” 2. Simplification: “the tendency to simplify the language used in translation” 3. Normalization/conservatism: “a tendency to exaggerate features of the target language” 4. Levelling out: “the tendency of translated text to gravitate towards the centre of a continuum”, i.e. to avoid stylistically marked ways of expression  (Baker 1996; cf. also Laviosa-Braithwaite 1998) The alleged universality of these commonly observed properties of translated texts has recently come to be disputed by House (2008) and Becher (2010b) (a less radical criticism of universals can already be found in Toury 2004). However, regardless of whether these tendencies represent genuine translation universals or merely typical properties of translated texts, we may expect that in cases where native text production is influenced by translations, the texts produced under such an influence should tend to be characterized by the same features. This leads to the following hypothesis: (10) In cases where translations come to serve as a model for text production in the RL, the texts produced under such an influence should exhibit similar tendencies as translated texts (e.g. a tendency towards explicitness rather than implicitness) © 2011. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved

 Svenja Kranich, Viktor Becher & Steffen Höder

3.  Language contact through translation: A tentative typology The present section will outline a model for a classification of LCTT situations which can make it possible to test the hypotheses presented in Section 2. It is clear that we will not yet be able to produce definite answers to the ten hypotheses, as we are only considering two LCTT situations in detail. However, the model presented in this section is also aimed at facilitating further research on LCTT between other language pairs and making them comparable to the results ­presented here. There are two main groups of variables. On the one hand, we will have to establish the factors concerning the socio-political background and the typological characteristics of the languages involved. On the other hand, we will have to classify the changes that can be observed according to the linguistic domain they pertain to. This gives rise to the following classificatory principles: Potentially relevant socio-political, cultural and linguistic factors in LCTT i. Orientation of the translator ii. Intensity of contact iii. Length of contact iv. Sociopolitical dominance relations v. Prestige of SL vi. Attitude towards the SL vii. Degree of standardization of the TL viii. Degree of establishment of the genre in TL ix. Typological proximity x. Potential for establishing functional equivalence between particular linguistic items Outcome of LCTT I. Lexical II. Morphological III. Syntactic IV. Pragmatic/stylistic A fifth point should be added to this list characterizing the outcome of the LCTT situation, which takes into account the hypothesis formulated on the basis of insights from translation studies: V. Greater explicitness of encoding in translated texts as compared to comparable non-translated texts: yes or no © 2011. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved



A tentative typology of translation-induced language change 

This last point is different in kind from the first four points classifying the outcome of the LCTT situation in that it does not refer to a particular linguistic domain, but can occur with respect to lexical, morphosyntactic and pragmatic features. Its inclusion seems fruitful since it may help to shed light on the question whether such a general tendency as the use of more explicit encoding patterns in translated texts will show up in texts influenced by translations or not. Even though it will not be possible to arrive at an answer to this question based on the two case studies presented here, it will be good to take it up in further investigations. Among the features listed in hypothesis (10), more explicit encoding seems to be the one that lends itself best to a quantitative analysis, as it seems easier to operationalize than the others. For instance, finite clauses are generally more explicit as far as marking of person and number are concerned than non-finite clauses (with the exception of such typologically rare cases as the Portuguese inflected infinitive). For the definition of explicitness applied here, see Becher (2010a). We will now go on to apply the classificatory principles suggested above to arrive at a typological description of the two different contact scenarios: Latin in contact with Old Swedish and present-day English in contact with German.

4.  Applying the typology 4.1  Latin-Old Swedish contact through translation 4.1.1  Socio-political, cultural and linguistic factors Late Medieval Sweden is characterized by a triglossic distribution (cf. Braunmüller 2005, 2007; Höder 2010: 28ff.) of three languages: The vernacular, Old Swedish, is used mainly as a Low variety or language of proximity (in the terms of Koch & Oesterreicher 1986, 2007) in the domains of everyday life. Like in Central Europe, Medieval Latin is spoken as a lingua franca, and more importantly, used as a written language for administrative, religious, and literary purposes, i.e. a High variety or language of distance. Middle Low German serves as an additional lingua franca within the Hanseatic area. It is used as a trading language and in administrative contexts, especially in the towns, where it is also the L1 of the socially and economically influential German minority. Within the same period, Old Swedish begins to develop into a literary language. This process of language Ausbau (in the sense of Kloss 1978) starts with the earliest texts written in the Latin alphabet (which replaces the older runic script used mainly for short inscriptions); these date from the early 13th century. Old Swedish Ausbau is related to three different sociocultural contexts or environments (administrative, urban, and religious/monastic), each characterized by Low German or Latin as the dominant contact language (Höder 2010: 82ff.). However, © 2011. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved

 Svenja Kranich, Viktor Becher & Steffen Höder

the dramatic increase in Old Swedish text production at the end of the 14th century is primarily based on genres (or discourse traditions, cf. Koch 1997) adopted from Latin models, the most important genre being religious prose (Wollin 1991).3 By far the most important centres of Old Swedish literacy are the Birgittine monasteries, most notably Vadstena Abbey in central Sweden, where the majority of all 15th and 16th century texts are written. These monastic communities are the locus of an intense and stable language contact between Latin and Old Swedish, though restricted to a cultural elite group of highly educated and literate bilinguals, as the authors, translators, scribes and readers of Old Swedish literature constitute only a subgroup of the clergy and, hence, a rather small minority within the entire population (cf. Öberg 1994). Linguistic norms as well as norm awareness among the translators (not to mention the illiterate majority of the Swedish-speaking population) are only slowly emerging. While there is no pre-existing codified standard prior to the Ausbau process, the newly emerged Written Old Swedish – as represented in the religious texts from the 14th and 15th century – subsequently serves as a model, or proto-standard, for the later Reformation bible translations. Later on, they in turn have a normative impact on language standardization from the 18th century onwards. It is, however, remarkable that unlike orthographic or morphological norms, syntactic (let alone textual) conventions do not become subject to standardization efforts until the beginning of the 20th century (Teleman 2003: 418ff.). Translations from Latin sources are increasingly prevailing in Old Swedish text production (cf. Wollin 1981/​1983). Latin is not only considered prestigious because of its religious importance as the language of liturgy and Scripture, but is also viewed as more useful, more logical and more expressive than the inferior vernacular, as can be inferred from metalinguistic evidence (Höder 2010: 87f.). In the Early Old Swedish period (ca. 1200–1400), the translated texts are relatively free paraphrases of the sources, and the translators aim at functional rather than formal equivalence between the source and the target text. In House’s (1997) terms, this relation can be explained through the application of a cultural filter in the translation process, making the text easier to understand and to use for its intended Swedish addressees. Key mechanisms involve (a) the addition of culture- or language-specific information, including (b) the intertextual information needed in order to relate religious texts to their biblical context, and (c) the deletion of information deemed unnecessary. A typical example is the Old Swedish paraphrase of the Pentateuch (from the first half of the 14th century), as compared to the Vulgate Bible. In the

.  The development of Swedish into an official language is a different, but of course related story (cf. Larsson 2003).

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A tentative typology of translation-induced language change 

following excerpt, the underlined passages do not correspond to each other, i.e. they represent additions to or deletions from the source text: (1)

Latin Vulgate (Genesis 1.1–2) In principio creavit Deus caelum et terram. Terra autem erat inanis et vacua et tenebrae super faciem abyssi […] ‘In the beginning, God created heaven and earth. And the earth was void and empty, and darkness was upon the face of the deep […]’

(2) Pentateukparafrasen (p. 119) Gudh skapadhe aff alzengho himil oc iordh. ey aff sik siælffuom som fadhir føde son. oc ey aff nakro æmpne som smedhir gør yxe Iordin war æn onyt oc tom oc myrk. […] ‘God created from nothing at all heaven and earth, not out of himself, as a father begets a son, and not out of any substance, as a smith makes an axe. The earth was still void and empty and dark […]

In Late Old Swedish (ca. 1400–1526), however, aiming at formal equivalence in translation becomes the preferred strategy. This innovation leads to an increasing formal correspondence between source and target texts, particularly regarding the textual structure and informational organization. One effect of this new strategy is that later translations differ considerably from earlier sources in characteristics such as a higher informational density, a higher degree of explicitness in extralinguistic reference, an increase in sentence length, a high frequency of hypotactic structures, or a preference for certain constituent order patterns (but not so far as to violate grammatical rules of Old Swedish, as is the case e.g. in interlinear translations). One of countless examples of the formally equivalent translation strategy is the following sentence from St. Bridget’s revelations (first quarter of the 15th century; square brackets indicate clause boundaries, curly brackets mark infinite clause equivalents):4 (3) Revelaciones 7.10 [O tu, [cui datum est {audire spiritualiter et videre}], audi nunc ea, [que tibi manifestare volo], videlicet de illo archiepiscopo, [qui dixit, [quod [si esset papa], ipse daret licenciam omnibus clericis et presbiteris {matrimonium contrahendi carnaliter}], {cogitans et credens [quod hoc esset acceptabilius Deo, [quam quod clerici viuerent dissolute, [sicut modo viuunt]]]}]].

.  The distinction between hypotactic and paratactic structures in Old Swedish is not as straightforward as the example might suggest; cf. the discussion in Höder & Zeevaert (2008: 174ff.) and in more detail Höder (2010: 126ff.).

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 Svenja Kranich, Viktor Becher & Steffen Höder

(4) Uppenbarelser 7.10 [Thw, [hwilken som giffuith ær {ath høra andheleka / och see}] Hør nw the tingh [som iach vill oppenbara tig] aff them ærchebiscopenom / [hwlkin som sagde [ath han ville geffwa allom prestomen loff {ath leffwa j køthliko hyonelaghy} / [om han ware pawe]] {Tænkiande ok throandhe {thet vara gwdhy tækkelikare / [æn ath klærkane leffde swa løslika [som the nw ­leffwa]]}}]]. ‘You [= St. Bridget], to whom it is given to hear and see spiritually, hear now the things that I wish to reveal to you, namely about the archbishop who said that he would allow all priests to live in carnal marriage if he were pope, for he thought and believed [lit.: thinking and believing] that this was more acceptable to God than that the clerics should live as dissolutely as they now live.’

Despite the complex sentence structure, the Swedish translation deviates only in three cases: 1. the conditional clause si esset papa precedes its matrix clause, whereas the Swedish om han ware pawe follows it; 2. a gerundial construction (matrimonium contrahendi carnaliter) is translated as an infinitive (ath leffwa j køthliko hyonelaghy); 3. a complement clause (quod hoc esset acceptabilius Deo) is translated as an accusativus cum infinitivo in Swedish (thet vara gwdhy tækkelikare). Otherwise, the clause types, the linear order and the hierarchical relations of the clauses and infinite clause equivalents are almost identical in the Latin source and its Swedish counterpart. Formally equivalent translation is, of course, dependent on the interlingual identification (Weinreich 1964: 7f.) of semantically and structurally equivalent elements in both languages (cf. also Section 2). However, as we will see, identifying such elements not only requires an intimate knowledge of the languages concerned, but also involves an act of linguistic creativity (cf. Heine & Kuteva 2005: 219ff.; Höder 2010: 52ff.) which in turn can lead to language change. In terms of the model proposed in Section 3, the Latin-Old Swedish contact situation after 1400 can thus be summarized as follows: –– The predominant translation strategy is overt; –– the prestige of the SL, Latin, is extremely high as compared to the low status of the vernacular (particularly given the high prestige of the religious domain and its literally ‘holy’ texts and genres); –– the contact between the SL and the TL is very intense, but restricted to a rather small community within the Swedish-speaking population;

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A tentative typology of translation-induced language change 

–– the degree of standardization in the TL is low (especially on the syntactic level); –– the relevant genres are not fully established in Old Swedish; –– the two languages are not closely related, though typologically relatively similar. On the basis of these factors, we would expect a rather high level of translationinduced influence. Indeed, the long-term linguistic outcome of the translationbased contact in the emerging written variety of Old Swedish, as compared to older sources and varieties, includes a number of interesting linguistic features. Written Old Swedish texts are characterized by both inter- and intrasentential code-switching (cf. Carlquist 2005a, 2005b; Wollin 2007) and a high frequency of lexical transfer, i.e. Latin loanwords with different degrees of phonological and morphological integration (cf. in example (4): ærchebiscopenom ‘archbishopdef-dat’  before’, sva sum ‘so as > as, as if, like’. Eventually, the Old Swedish subjunction inventory as a whole can be described as a replica of the Latin one, i.e. it is basically a set of translational equivalents (and indeed, until the 20th century, it was standard practice in dictionaries to define the meaning of subjunctions by indicating its Latin counterpart). 4.1.3  Gerundives Another case of linguistic change as a result of translation in the Latin-Old Swedish contact scenario concerns the emergence of gerundives in Late Old Swedish texts (cf. Höder 2010: 227ff.). Like the other Germanic languages, Early Old Swedish does not possess an inflectional verbal category to express that something has to be done. Latin, however, has a verbal adjective (inflected for case, number, and gender) with this function. The Latin gerundive is semantically passive, i.e. in a construction of the type Carthago est delenda ‘Carthage must be destroyed’, the subject denotes the patient of the action. In Late Old Swedish translations, Latin gerundives are frequently translated by periphrastic constructions (such as skal skrivas ‘shall be written [lit.: shall write-pass]’). However, we also find translational equivalents that are structurally more similar to the Latin form: (5) Uppenbarelser 4.40 Älla huat ey är jak forsmande for thy at dödhin or what not am I despise-ptcp because death-def var smälikin oc hardhir? was miserable and hard ‘Or should I be despised because my death was miserable and hard?’ (6) Uppenbarelser 7.4 Och æn tha the hionelagh […] waro fast ok and although those marriages were ratified and halla skolandhe keep-inf shall-ptcp ‘and although those marriages […] were ratified and should be kept’

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(7)

A tentative typology of translation-induced language change 

Uppenbarelser 4.41 thy är ängin forsmaskulande therefore is nobody despise-inf-shall-ptcp ‘nobody should be despised for that reason’

In these constructions, either the present participle of the main verb is used as a translational equivalent of the Latin gerundive (as in (5)), or the infinitive of the main verb is followed by the present participle of skula ‘shall’ (as in (6) and (7)). Such constructions obviously reflect a process of contact-induced grammaticalization in Old Swedish (a grammatical form in the source language is replicated in the target language via grammaticalization). Gerundive constructions are rather infrequent in Late Old Swedish. They occur mostly but not exclusively as translational equivalents of Latin gerundives, and they do not survive in the later written language. However, the gerundive constructions cannot simply be explained as translation interferences or ­nonce-formations, but have to be regarded as conventionalized to some extent, since they constantly deviate structurally and semantically from the Latin model. To put it simply, they are too strange to be the product of repeated but unconnected individual innovations. Two features of these constructions are striking. Firstly, the present participle is used in a passive context despite its morphologically active form; a form such as forsmande could in principle, and would normally, be interpreted as ‘despising, one who despises’ rather than ‘one who should be despised’. Similarly, the passive voice is not expressed unambiguously in the complex constructions: halla skulandhe could as well mean ‘one who should keep’ instead of the intended passive reading ‘something that should be kept.’ If a translator aimed to translate a Latin gerundive into Old Swedish, he could avoid this (potentially problematic) ambiguity by choosing a periphrastic translation. If, according to the principle of formal equivalence, he aimed to use an Old Swedish form that is structurally similar to the Latin verbal adjective, he could easily translate the Latin gerundive by, for instance, the present participle of skula plus the passive infinitive (e.g. hallas skulandhe ‘keep-inf-pass should-ptcp’). However, neither such forms nor any other attempt to render the passive voice explicitly in gerundive constructions are attested. Secondly, it is remarkable that the present participle of skula is quite frequently attached to the infinitive without a space in between (as in (7)). Such a univerbation could indicate an additional stage in a grammaticalization process leading to affixation and, potentially in a further step, phonetic reduction, though such steps are not attested in the Late Old Swedish texts. Thus, the univerbated forms mark the beginning of a potential morphological change in Old Swedish as the result of contact through translation.

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 Svenja Kranich, Viktor Becher & Steffen Höder

4.2  English-German contact through translation 4.2.1  Sociopolitical, cultural and linguistic factors This section presents results from the project Covert Translation, which investigates the influence of English-German translations on the development of the German language between 1978 and 2002. Since contact-induced change is expected to predominantly affect genres which show a low degree of establishment in the RL, two relatively young genres of German were chosen for analysis: business communication and popular science. The case studies to be presented in the following were carried out on the popular science corpus of the project, containing magazine articles from popular scientific journals such as Scientific American and Spektrum der Wissenschaft. The corpus consists of: a. English texts, b. their German translations, and c. comparable (non-translated) German texts. Most notably, for all three parts of the corpus, texts have been sampled from two different time-frames, 1978–1982 and 1999–2002. The multi-part, diachronic makeup of this corpus makes it possible to identify lexicogrammatical items potentially leading to SL interference, analyze and count associated interference phenomena, and, in a last step, to check whether these phenomena have diachronically propagated to non-translated German texts. With respect to the parameters outlined in Section 3, the specific language contact situation investigated in the project Covert Translation may be summarized as follows: –– The mode of translation chosen is covert. English-German translators of popular science texts generally try to make their translation products comply with the communicative preferences of the German linguaculture. –– English-German contact is intense and has a long tradition. It is not confined to the scenario investigated here, but takes place in a variety of contact situations (English-German bilinguals, second language learners, etc.). With respect to the present scenario, it is important to note that according to UNESCO’s Index Translationum, English texts are translated into German more often than into any other language (Becher 2009: 2f). –– Due to the close political alliance between Germany and the U.S. on the one hand and the high prestige of English as a global lingua franca (potentially opening up job opportunities etc.) on the other, the attitude of native speakers of German towards English is highly favorable. As for the genre popular science, it seems plausible to assume that English-German translations function

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A tentative typology of translation-induced language change 

as models for the production of non-translated German text (Baumgarten 2008). –– The long literary tradition of German has led to the language being highly standardized. On the other hand, the genre popular science does not have a long tradition in the German-speaking countries. (This contrasts with the strong establishment of the genre in English: the first issue of Scientific American appeared in 1845.) –– Though the two languages are genetically closely related, English and German have moved away from each other considerably typologically. Most importantly, English is SVO while German has retained the inherited Germanic V2 word order (in declarative main clauses). Still, English and German share a great deal of morphology and syntax, which should make it easy for bilinguals to see functional equivalence relations between particular linguistic items. While translation-induced language change may happen on the lexical, morphological, syntactic and/or pragmatic level (see Section 3), work in the project has focused on the pragmatic level. This decision was made because: 1. Translation-induced changes on the lexical level (‘anglicisms’) are relatively well-documented (see e.g. Onysko 2007), having been discussed even in the popular media.10 2. It is unlikely that contact-induced change affecting the morphosyntactic ‘core’ of the German language system has taken place in the short time-span of 25 years investigated here, especially since the morphosyntax of German is well-codified. In contrast to the rather rigid nature of morphosyntax, pragmatic norms governing language use are rather flexible and hardly codified at all. While morphosyntax is typically concerned with specific, absolute distinctions (such as the type of complement that a verb subcategorizes for [e.g. finite vs. non-finite clause]), pragmatic norms

.  For example, German prescriptivists regularly voice their complaints about semantic borrowing, i.e. German words which have acquired a new sense due to English-German contact through the written medium. A prominent example of such a word is Administration. Its original sense was ‘management’, but in compounds such as Bush-Administration the word has acquired the new sense of ‘government’. This case of semantic borrowing goes back to German journalists and English-German translators wrongly rendering the compound Bush administration as Bush-Administration instead of using the ‘proper’ term Bush-Regierung or Regierung Bush (Regierung meaning ‘government’). A web search for the term Obama-Administration shows that this usage has caught on, so that it can be said that Administration has acquired a new sense for many Germans.

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 Svenja Kranich, Viktor Becher & Steffen Höder

are often of an unspecific, quantitative character. For example, the textual norms of English demand a high degree of ‘interactionality’ and addressee-orientation, while German discourse generally tends towards ‘transactionality’ and contentorientation (House 1997, 2006; cf. Biber’s 1988 textual dimension ‘Involved versus Informational Production’). The following example nicely illustrates how this difference in communicative conventions can affect decisions made by English-German translators:11 (8) EngOrig (English Original): In every area of our business, you can see this pattern. GerTrans (German Translation): Dieses Schema lässt sich in allen ­Geschäftsbereichen erkennen. ‘This pattern can be seen in all business areas.’

The English source text of (8) is highly interactional and addressee-oriented, the authors referring to themselves (our) and to the addressee (you). It is made explicit in which way the authors and the addressee are involved in the state of affairs expressed. The German translation is very different. It focuses on the state of affairs being expressed, completely omitting any reference to the participants of this communicative event. The translation may thus be characterized as transactional and content-oriented. Since the translator of (8) was presumably led by the communicative preferences of German in making her translation choices, we can say that she has applied a “cultural filter” (House 1997) to the English source text. But cultural filtering does not occur invariably, and it is not obligatory. In fact, the factors mentioned above suggest that cultural filtering in English-German translations might decrease diachronically, leading to translated texts which are closer to the communicative norms of English than to the ones of German. In a second step, authors of non-translated German texts might pick up Anglophone usage patterns from the English-German translations, allowing them to permeate the genre as a whole. This is the overarching hypothesis that has been investigated in the project Covert Translation. The hypothesis has been tested in a range of studies on the use of a variety of linguistic items: 1. Speaker-hearer deictics: Eng. we vs. Ger. wir (Baumgarten & Özçetin 2008; Baumgarten 2008) 2. Epistemic modal expressions, e.g. Eng. might, Ger. könnte ‘could’ (Kranich 2009b, 2009c, 2009d; Becher et al. 2009)

.  The example is an extract from the business corpus of the project Covert Translation. All following examples were taken from the project’s popular science corpus.

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A tentative typology of translation-induced language change 

3. Connectives in sentence-initial position, e.g. Eng. but vs. Ger. aber/doch ‘but’ (Baumgarten 2007; Becher 2009; Becher et al. 2009) These items were chosen because their use is strongly associated with the pragmatic norms mentioned above. For example, frequent use of speaker-hearer deictics such as we typically expresses a high degree of interactionality and addressee orientation (cf. (8) above). In the following, results from two representative studies carried out within the project Covert Translation, one on epistemic modal expressions and one on sentence-initial concessive conjunctions, will be briefly discussed. The first study deals with the use of epistemic modal expressions while the second one is concerned with the use of sentence-initial concessive conjunctions. 4.2.2  Epistemic modal expressions Possible Anglophone influence on the use of epistemic modal expressions has been investigated by Kranich (2009b, 2009c, 2009d; see also Becher et al. 2009). Epistemic modal markers are used by speakers to express their evaluation of, or confidence in, the truth of a proposition. Cf. the following examples:

(9) That is, the injury to the brain stem might somehow interfere with the proper development or wiring of other brain regions.

(10) More familiar terms for ‘the best imitators’ in modern life may be ‘trendsetters’ or ‘role models’.

In both (9) and (10), the epistemic modal marker encodes that the writer is not fully committed to the truth of the proposition expressed. The writer does not fully assert that the proposition expressed in the utterances is true, but only that she considers it possible that the proposition is true. The modal markers in (9) and (10) can thus be said to have a common addressee-oriented function: by using them, the writer does not impose a certain world-view on her addressees, but leaves a set of possible states of affairs to be considered (cf. Kratzer 1977) that readers might find easier to integrate into their personal belief systems. The addressee-oriented character of epistemic modal markers prompted Kranich (2009b) to hypothesize that: (a) such expressions are more frequent in English than in German popular science texts, (b) English-German translations in this genre display usage patterns of epistemic modals different from German originals, (c) these usage patterns eventually propagate to their non-translated counterparts due to the role model-like function of English-German translations in the German popular science genre. The first of these hypotheses has been clearly confirmed. Kranich (2009c) found both quantitative and qualitative differences. Quantitatively, epistemic

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 Svenja Kranich, Viktor Becher & Steffen Höder

modal markers are remarkably more frequent in the English than in the German texts investigated. German popular science authors often leave propositions unmodified where their English colleagues hedge by resorting to a modal. Qualitatively, where they resort to epistemic modification all, German authors prefer to use an expression of high rather than low modal strength (e.g. dürfte ‘should’ rather than könnte ‘could’). The second hypothesis was confirmed as well. Kranich (2009d) found a certain degree of shining through in the investigated English-German translations, as the translations showed a higher use of elements marking low modal strength and an elevated frequency of epistemic modal markers overall as compared to the non-translated German texts. The results basically confirm Toury’s Law of Source Language Interference, as well as House’s assumption that a high prestige of the SL reduces the extent of cultural filtering (cf. Section 2). The third hypothesis, however, which postulates an influence of the deviant use of epistemic modals in the translations on non-translated texts of the same genre, was clearly falsified. Neither did source language interference increase over time (rather it decreased a little bit), nor were authors of non-translated German texts influenced by the divergent usage patterns of epistemic modal markers in the English-German translations. Kranich (2009b, 2009c) explained this result with recourse to the English-German contrasts in the domain of epistemic modality: since the German and English lexicogrammatical systems of expressing epistemic modality are so different, translators in many cases do not perceive any one-to-one functional equivalences. In the face of the differences between the English and German inventories of epistemic modal verbs, translators are prompted to go beyond mere formal equivalence and to exploit the specifically German ways of epistemic modification. The lack of functional equivalence relations – as perceived by translators – thus seems to put an upper bound on the possible extent of source language interference. Consequently, the hypothesized influence of translated on non-translated German texts in this case is impeded right from the start. 4.2.3  Sentence-initial concessive conjunctions The influence of English-German translations on the use of sentence-initial concessive conjunctions has been investigated by Becher (see Becher et al. 2009). The main concessive conjunctions of English and German are but, aber and doch.12 .  Semantically, but, aber and doch are contrastive. However, at least in popular scientific texts, the three conjunctions are rarely used to encode contrastive discourse relations. Rather, through a pragmatic inferential mechanism of ‘overinterpretation’ (on which see Umbach 2005: 226f with respect to but), they come to express mainly concessive relations (cf. Becher et al. 2009).

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A tentative typology of translation-induced language change 

Their use in in sentence-initial position regularly engenders special rhetorical effects. Consider the use of but in the following examples: (11) EngOrig: But what caused these calamities in the first place […]? GerTrans: Wie kam es zu der erstaunlichen Klima-Instabilität […]? ‘How did the astonishing climate instability come about?’ (12) EngOrig: […] the entire endeavor of robotics has failed rather completely to live up to the predictions of the 1950s […] It is true that industrial robots have transformed the manufacture of automobiles, among other ­products. But that kind of automation is a far cry from the versatile, mobile, ­autonomous creations that so many scientists and engineers have hoped for. GerTrans: Gewiß, Industrieroboter spielen in der Produktion von Autos und anderen Gütern inzwischen eine wesentliche Rolle. Aber die sind weit entfernt von dem, was so viele Forscher und Ingenieure sich erträumt ­hatten. ‘Certainly, industrial robots play an essential role by now in the ­production of cars and other goods. But they are far away removed from what so many ­researchers and engineers have dreamed of.’

In (11), the discourse marker-like use of but reminds us of how the connective is used in face-to-face communication, namely to signal dissent and to mark turn boundaries (inter alia; cf. e.g. Gumperz, Kaltmann & O’Connor 1984; Schiffrin 1987). The rhetorical question in (11) thus strikes us as a possible objection by the reader that the author anticipates. In (12), but may be said to function as a marker of the discourse pattern Claim–Response, which, again, is highly reminiscent of face-to-face communication. Initially, the author explicitly acknowledges the truth of the Claim that “industrial robots have transformed the manufacture of automobiles”, an opinion which will be shared by many readers. Subsequently, he offers a Response to this Claim, pointing out that today’s robots are not that sophisticated after all. In both examples, the use of sentence-initial but highlights the dialogical, controversial nature of the discourse and engenders the impression of a genuine interaction between author and reader. It is thus not surprising that the translator of (11) has decided to deviate from the ST by leaving but untranslated – although the use of a sentence-initial concessive conjunction such as aber or doch would have been possible. This translatory shift may be seen as a (successful) attempt of the translator to comply with the communicative preferences of the German linguaculture, which, as has been briefly discussed above, favor a transactional rather than interactional style of exposition. In fact, interventions by the translator like the present one were found to be common in the investigated corpus, suggesting that English-German translators regularly apply a “cultural filter” in order to comply with the stylistic norms of German.

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 Svenja Kranich, Viktor Becher & Steffen Höder

The translator of (12), on the other hand, has decided to ‘literally’ translate sentence-initial but by means of aber, thus also adopting the interactional, involved style of the English original. This decision is remarkable, since it shows the translator’s willingness to refrain from applying a cultural filter in certain cases. (This contrasts with other translations in the corpus where sentence-initial but is consistently dropped or translated by means of a more ‘neutral’, sentence-internal connective.) The inconsistent application of the cultural filter noted in connection with examples such as (11) and (12) prompted a detailed quantitative investigation of the phenomenon. It was hypothesized that: (a) application of the cultural filter in English-German translations decreases diachronically as translators worry less and less about complying with the communicative conventions of German, (b) due to the role model-like function of English-German translations in the genre popular science, authors of originally German texts use sentence-initial aber and doch more frequently over time as they increasingly adopt usage patterns from the translations. The first hypothesis is confirmed by an investigation of translational equivalents of sentence-initial but. While in the first time-frame of the corpus (1978–1982), most occurrences of sentence-initial but were translated by means of sentenceinternal connectives such as aber or jedoch ‘however’, the most frequent translation choices in the second time-frame (1999–2002) were found to be aber and doch in sentence-initial position. While absolute confirmation of the second hypothesis is hardly possible, the available quantitative evidence is strongly in favor of the hypothesis.13 The following table (taken from Becher et al. 2009: 143) displays the frequency of the sentence-initial conjunctions in question in English in the investigated corpus: Table 1.  Frequency of sentence-initial but in English popular science texts and aber/doch in their German translations and comparable German texts (per 1000 sentences; n = 621)

English source texts (but) English-German translations (aber/doch) Non-translated German texts (aber/doch)

1978–1982

1999–2002

development

32.6 22.7

32.6 30.1

none +32.5%

  9.0

19.8

+119.8%

.  This is because when we find a quantitative development in translations on the one hand and non-translated texts on the other (as in Table 1), the two developments could in principle be unrelated, i.e. independently motivated. However, additional, qualitative evidence suggests that in this case the developments are indeed related (see below).

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A tentative typology of translation-induced language change 

From the table, we see that the frequency of sentence-initial aber and doch is much higher in the English-German translations than in the non-translated German texts and shows a notable increase (by 32.5%) towards the second timeframe. This is not surprising in light of the fact that the first hypothesis has been confirmed. What is much more remarkable is the frequency increase witnessed in the non-translated German texts. One gets the impression that the non-translated texts have been catching up with the English-German translations from 1978 to 2002, i.e. that their production was indeed influenced by the influential role of the translations in this genre. This impression gains further support from a qualitative analysis of the use of sentence-initial aber and doch in the non-translated German texts. It was found that the two conjunctions fulfill the same interaction-oriented discourse functions as in the English-German translations. This suggests that German authors were indeed inspired by the translations in their increasing use of sentence-initial aber and doch, which would make this case a prime example of language contact through translation.

5.  C  ontrasting Latin-Old Swedish and English-German contact through translation The case studies presented here exhibit both similarities and differences. The table below provides an overview of the results discussed in Section 4. Table 2.  Latin-Old Swedish vs. English-German contact through translation

i. Orientation of the translator ii. Intensity of contact iii. Length of contact iv. Sociopolitical dominance relations v. Prestige of SL vi. Attitude towards SL vii. Degree of standardization of TL

Latin-Old Swedish

English-German

overt translation

covert translation

very high, but restricted to small group of speakers 200 years of intense contact competent bilinguals are influential within Swedish society

very high across a variety of contexts 40–50 years in the genres investigated SL community (especially the U.S.) is sociopolitically dominant high positive very high

extraordinarily high positive very low

(Continued)

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 Svenja Kranich, Viktor Becher & Steffen Höder Table 2.  Latin-Old Swedish vs. English-German contact through translation (Continued)

viii. Degree of establishment of the genre in TL ix. Typological proximity x.

Potential for establishing functional equivalence between particular linguistic items I. Lexical influence II. Morphological changes III. Syntactic changes IV. Pragmatic/stylistic effects V. Greater explicitness of encoding in the TT

Latin-Old Swedish

English-German

not yet established

young and weakly established

medium (genetically distantly related, typological similarities) high where languages are not too different typologically

medium (genetically closely related, typological similarities) high where languages are not too different typologically

high yes (gerundives)

high no

yes yes

no yes

yes

no

We can begin by observing some similarities between the two contact situations. Both are characterized by a high prestige of the SL in the TL society (or rather, high prestige is attributed to the culture associated with the SL). Members of the TL society with a high competence in the SL tend to occupy influential positions in society. With regard to the English-German contact situations, particularly with regard to the U.S. we can also speak of a relation of sociopolitical dominance. If we assume with Matras (2007) that high prestige of the SL is a prerequisite for SL interference to be found acceptable (see Section 2), we can say that this prerequisite is fulfilled in both cases. Concerning the other factors, we can see some important differences. One of the most striking differences among the extralinguistic factors can be seen in factor (vii): while Old Swedish did not have an established written standard at all at the time of the contact, but actually only evolved a written variety through contact with Latin (i.e. Ausbau), written German is clearly standardized and fully codified. This difference can be seen as the reason for the difference noted in factor (i): Covert Translation represents, broadly speaking, the only acceptable type where the TL is fully standardized (with a few exceptions such as translations of religious texts, poetry, major works of literature etc.). Overt Translations with their focus on formal equivalence tend to violate too many of the established norms in such a situation. When the TL is, however, not yet fully codified, as in the Old Swedish case, translators can take more liberties: since they have few © 2011. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved



A tentative typology of translation-induced language change 

conceptions of norms, they feel free to model their text on the esteemed Latin ST wherever it suits them. The crucial differences between the outcomes of the two contact situations can be attributed to this difference in degree of standardization. German texts only show impact of English on the lexis and on pragmatic and stylistic features of texts. Morphology and Syntax are not affected; the fixed codification of these domains blocks influence through LCTT. For instance, an English-German translator would never deviate from German word order rules just to follow the English model. Pragmatic-stylistic features, on the other hand, such as an overuse of sentenceinitial conjunctions inspired by the English model, are not blocked, because the domain of pragmatics and stylistics is considerably less codified. Translators therefore do not have clear conceptions of what is appropriate in this respect within a certain genre. In the Latin-Old Swedish contact, the situation for Old Swedish corresponds in general to that of Modern German in the area of pragmatics: writers may have a certain idea of what is more or less usual, but they do not have recourse to established norms and standards which would block SL impact. This leads to Latin influence in all linguistic domains, including morphology and syntax. As far as the ten hypotheses introduced in Section 3 are concerned, we can now offer some tentative suggestions about their validity. Hypothesis (1) (lexical borrowing is more prominent than structural borrowing) cannot be fully verified on the basis of just two contact situations. We can note, however, that in both cases lexical borrowings occur to a great extent. Hypothesis (2) (structural borrowing is limited to syntactic borrowing) can be proved wrong. In the contact between Latin and Old Swedish, changes in the TL can be observed which pertain to the domain of morphology: gerundives are formed on the basis of the Latin model. Although these forms never get fully established in Old Swedish and eventually fall out of use, the evidence shows that such changes do indeed occur (with some frequency, not just in nonce-formations), and it is therefore easily imaginable that in another contact situation there could be lasting effects on TL morphology induced by LCTT. Hypothesis (3) (all linguistic domains (except phonology) can be affected in LCTT), by the same reason, finds confirmation. Hypotheses (4) and (5), dealing with the impact of typological distance and the possibility of establishing form-function equivalences, cannot be elucidated on the basis of the present study, since the two language pairs investigated here do not exhibit contrasts in this respect: in both cases, the two languages in contact are typologically not very distant, and the ease of establishing functional equivalence relations should be similar. With regard to hypotheses (6) to (9), concerning the importance of extralinguistic factors, we make the tentative suggestion that prestige may be a necessary prerequisite for any adoption of SL features. Degree of standardization of the TL is considered as crucial for the potential impact of the SL: we assume that adoption © 2011. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved

 Svenja Kranich, Viktor Becher & Steffen Höder

of SL features takes place only in domains of the TL which are not (yet) codified. The impact of the degree of establishment of the genre may be similar, in that translators have clearer concepts of what constitutes appropriate usage in genres with firm roots in the TL textual repertoire. However, the impact of this factor could not be clarified on the basis of the present results, but would necessitate e.g. a comparison of German translations from English in popular science with translation of news paper articles or novels. Similarly, we cannot say much about the other extralinguistic factors, e.g. the degree of bilingualism in society and the length of contact. They may also play a role, but their impact does not stand out clearly from our investigation of two LCTT situations. Finally, concerning the last hypothesis, according to which texts influenced through translations may exhibit translation-typical features such as greater explicitness of encoding, we may remark that the changes observed in the LatinOld Swedish case do indeed lead to greater explicitness. Replicating the Latin subordination system leads to a greater number of monosemic subordinating strategies which mark the semantic relation between main and subordinate clause in an unambiguous manner. However, this goes back to the fact that the Latin system is more explicit than the original Old Swedish system. Clearly taking over a more explicit system leads to greater explicitness in the RL. But this has to do with the specific characteristics of the particular SL, not with a general feature of translated texts. Greater explicitness cannot generally be established in the case of English-German translations. This discourages the idea of explication as a translation universal (cf. also Becher 2010b). Whether or not there is in fact a certain quantitative trend for translations and for texts influenced by translations to be more explicit would have to be verified using a greater sample of language pairs.

6.  Conclusion The present paper represents a first step towards a typology of language contact through translation, an area neglected in contact linguistics up to date. Based on findings on language contact in general and findings from translation studies, we were able to deduce ten hypotheses concerning this specific type of language contact and devised a model for the analysis of LCTT situations. Through the classification of ten variables that can be assumed to have an impact on the outcome of LCTT and of five variables concerning the observable contact-induced effects, one arrives at a detailed picture of the individual contact situation. Contact situations classified in this way become easily comparable with each other, and the different weight of the factors included can thus be brought to light.

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A tentative typology of translation-induced language change 

We hope that there will be opportunities to apply the framework to a larger sample of language pairs in contact through translation. Even with just a sample of two contact scenarios, we were already able to arrive at certain insights concerning the hypotheses introduced in Section 2. We saw, for instance, that it is not the case that structural impact in LCTT is limited to syntactic changes, as in the Latin-Old Swedish scenario morphological innovations could also be observed. Furthermore, we established ‘degree of standardization’ as a factor of prime importance for the kind of changes that are possible in LCTT. In Old Swedish, no standardized written form of the language existed, and all domains were affected through contact with Latin. In German, the written language is highly codified, and there are no changes in syntax and morphology due to contact with English. However, impact on pragmatic and stylistic features through translations can be shown in certain cases, and these are notably domains for which no fully codified standard exists (e.g. relatively young genres such as the popular scientific article). Clearly, a number of open questions remain. We cannot yet say to what extent e.g. the length of contact influences the outcome of LCTT, or whether lexical borrowing is in general more common than syntactic borrowing. We strongly hope that there will be opportunities to investigate these open questions in subsequent work on the topic.

Source texts Pentateukparafrasen: Thorell, O. (ed.). 1959. Fem Moseböcker på fornsvenska enligt Cod. Holm. A 1 [Samlingar utgivna av Svenska fornskriftsällskapet 1.60). Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell. Revelaciones 7: Bergh, B. (ed.). 1967. Den Heliga Birgittas Revelaciones. Bok VII [Samlingar utgivna av Svenska fornskriftsällskapet 2.7.7]. Uppsala: Almqvist & Wiksell. Uppenbarelser 4: Klemming, G.E. (ed.). 1860. Heliga Birgittas uppenbarelser. Efter gamla handskrifter, Vol. 2 [Samlingar utgivna av Svenska fornskriftsällskapet 1.14.2]. Stockholm: Norstedt. Uppenbarelser 7: Lindell, I. (ed.). 2000. Heliga Birgittas uppenbarelser bok 7 efter Cod. Ups. C 61 Diplomatarisk utgåva med kommenterande inledning [Samlingar utgivna av Svenska fornskriftsällskapet 1.84]. Uppsala: Svenska fornskriftsällskapet.

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© 2011. John Benjamins Publishing Company All rights reserved