Repeated reporting verbs in English novels and their Italian and Polish translations: A preliminary multifactorial study

Abstract In this explanatory study, we aim to determine the predictors of repetition avoidance or reproduction in the translation of reporting verbs from English into Italian and Polish, using a sample of 11 novels. We fit multiple negative binomial regression models with fixed effects to assess the impact of five predictor variables (i.e. frequency of a source-text verb, number of its translation equivalents in lexical databases, its number of senses, semantic-pragmatic category of verb, and length in characters) on the response variable, i.e., the number of different target language verb types into which a source text reporting verb is translated. The overall model fit per the lowest Akaike Information Criterion (AIC) value obtained through backward elimination reveals that verb category, frequency of a source-text reporting verb, and number of translation equivalents make the largest individual contributions to explaining the proportion of variation in the response variable in the Italian data; for the Polish translations the corresponding variables are verb category, frequency, the number of senses, and the interaction between the number of translation equivalents and the number of senses. The summaries of the final models provide a detailed multifactorial picture of when repetition of reporting verbs is maintained or avoided in literary translation.