Studia Islandica - 01.06.1994, Page 209
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lack of appreciation on the part of the translators as to the
expressive potential and significance of syntax.
Admittedly, in many cases there is no possibility of pre-
serving the feature in question, as it often does not exist in
English, or at least not in modern, acceptable English.
Examples of this are the use of tense shifts, formal second
person pronouns, and subjunctives in the saga, all of which
have been discussed here. None of these features is direct-
ly reproduceable in English - but this should not mean the
functions they serve should be simply ignored or written
off.
The same could be said of many syntactical features
which exist in both English and Old Icelandic, yet serve
different purposes or are utilised in a different manner in
the two languages. Among these one could name the fre-
quency of independent clauses joined with conjunctions ok
and en used in the Old Icelandic and the layered negative
constructions.' In such cases direct imitation can only
result in distortion.
Most of the translators either consciously or uncon-
sciously reproduce more overt stylistic features, such as
alliteration, antitheses, and repetition, which lend them-
selves easily to imitation. Here some, if not all, of the trans-
lators go to considerable lengths to render like by like, with
resulting constructions that are sometimes successful and
sometimes far less so.
The question of which linguistic features of the target
language can reproduce a given language dimension in the
target text is hardly to be answered once and for all. But it
involves putting the entire range of target language possi-
bilities to their fullest advantage.
In an essay on the translation of idiomatic speech and
collocations of language, Pedersen (1988:135) maintains
1 The question of how their functions could be reproduced in translation
was discussed in the section of Chapter IV dealing with narrative style.