Le Petit Prince and the Variation Across German Translations from a Linguistic Perspective
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Abstract
Saint-Exupéry’s Le petit prince is a literary classic that has been read worldwide, across generations, and languages. Different translations in the same language are widely available, providing numerous aspects to be explored. Its German translations are of particular interest because of the active movement of retranslating this work. This research thus has two main objectives: 1) to provide an overview of key similarities and differences of various German translations in terms of vocabulary, grammar, and structure; and 2) to identify important characteristics of German through different translations with reflections from comparisons among the translations themselves and between them and the original text. A self-compiled parallel corpus of the original French text and six German versions was examined qualitatively using a traditional linguistic framework. In terms of lexical variations, key words were mostly translated with the same German equivalents; however, variation between two and three synonyms is common. Regarding the grammatical categories, variations are found in numbers, tenses, moods, voices, and pronouns. In terms of syntactic structure, three important features can be identified: the variation between full verbs and constructions with a nominal or a prepositional phrase, the variation of phrase types, and word order variation. Important characteristics of German were also reflected in the length difference, variation of addition and omission, and topicalization. All these aspects contribute to the variation across translations, which goes partially back to German’s richness in forms and structures rather than the concept of retranslation motivated by the shifts in readership. The research findings may be useful for teaching German as a foreign language.
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