Translating pragmatic markers : or whatever you want to call them

Abstract: This study analyses the translation of pragmatic markers from English into Swedish. The source text that was translated and used as a basis for the study is an article called “Black Books”, which was published in the British music magazine Prog in January 2013. The study is limited to question tags, general extenders and single-word pragmatic markers. It aims to investigate how these types of pragmatic markers can be translated in a dynamic and natural way, as well as how a careful analysis can facilitate the search for appropriate translation equivalents. Previous research and theories were used to determine the functions of the pragmatic markers in the source text, and the translation choices made on the basis of these findings were supported by corpus searches in the English-Swedish Parallel Corpus and Korp. The study revealed that because of the different ways in which pragmatic functions are expressed in English and Swedish, almost none of the pragmatic markers in the source text could be translated directly into Swedish. Formally equivalent solutions such as tja as a translation of well were generally considered too unnatural. While the study is too small to provide any general guidelines, it shows how a careful analysis may help the translator find more dynamically equivalent and natural solutions in the form of, for instance, other Swedish pragmatic markers, modal particles, adverbs and conjunctions.