The long and the short of it : the translation of non-finite adverbial clauses and ly-adverbials

Abstract: This study investigates the translation of non-finite supplementive clauses and one-word adverbials with a suffix of -ly in an English non-fiction text of academic prose and its Swedish target text. The results show that the non-finite supplementive clauses often are translated into either a new main clause, a coordinated clause or a subordinate clause, where the latter in a majority of cases involves the use of explicitation. The main clause strategy proved the most frequently used, indicating a possible connection between choice of translation strategy and source text sentence length. The ly-adverbials show a clear tendency for translation into one-word open-class adverbials in Swedish, most frequently with a suffix of -t. Clear differences were found between the investigated adverbial structures regarding movement; the supplementive clauses retain their source text positions in a vast majority of cases whereas the ly-adverbials show a higher frequency of movement, most commonly from their original source text position to sentence-final position in the target text. Other factors proven to impact the choice of translation strategies are compliance with Swedish preference regarding adverbial placement (in turn dependent on the type, grammatical structure and length of the adverbial as well as the register of the source text), the clarity and readability of the target text as well as style and level of formality.