Syntactic Borrowing in Contemporary French
A Linguistic Analysis of News Translation

Mairi McLaughlin


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Research Monographs in French Studies 30

Legenda: Oxford, 2011
£40.00 ($75.00 US)  Hardback  148pp
ISBN: 978-1-906540-66-1


It is widely held that the large-scale translation of international news from English will lead to changes in French syntax. For the first time this assumption is put to the test using extensive fieldwork carried out in an international news agency and a corpus of translated news agency dispatches. The linguistic analysis of three syntactic structures in the translations is complemented by an investigation of the effects of a range of factors including, most notably, the speed at which the translation is carried out. The analysis sheds new light on the ways in which news translation could lead to syntactic borrowing in French, and by extension, in other languages.

Mairi McLaughlin is Assistant Professor of French at the University of California, Berkeley.

Reviews:

  • ‘Throughout, the author demonstrates a strong awareness of methodology, a solid grounding in the relevant literature, and a laudable attention to detail... Deserves to become a point of reference for future studies within the field.’ — Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen, Modern Language Review 107.4 (October 2012), 1248-49
  • ‘Works like this, at the crossroads of linguistics and translation studies, are all too rare. The potential of the work reported here to inspire further investigation is considerable.’ — Nigel Armstrong, Modern and Contemporary France 20.2 (February 2012), 267-68
  • ‘En somme, cet ouvrage est très convaincant par sa rigueur (méthodologie, présence de graphiques), son aspect novateur et sa clarté. Il peut servir de référence aux chercheurs et doctorants de diverses disciplines telles que l’évolution du français contemporain, le contact des langues (en particulier la transmission de l’emprunt syntaxique) ou la traduction.’ — Michèle Vincent, French Studies 66.4 (October 2012), 594-95


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