For Cackles and Giggles: The Joys of Translating Collective Nouns

Collective nouns for groups of animals are pseudo-partitives with considerable semantic variation in English, ranging from garden-variety items (a pack of wolves, a herd of elephants, a flock of geese, etc.) to exotic coinages (a shiver of sharks, an exaltation of larks, etc.). In contrast, the Romanian lexical inventory is by far poorer, including only standard collective nouns (o cireadă de vaci (‘a herd of cattle’) o turmă de oi (‘a flock of sheep’), o haită de lupi (‘a pack of wolves’), etc.). Building on these lexical gaps, the article explores the translation strategies rendering English collective nouns into Romanian and the syntactic patterns they generate. It is argued that the frequent lack of equivalent forms in Romanian forces translators to resort to various compensation mechanisms with both shortening and lengthening syntactic effects, though semantic implicitation appears to be the norm (Blum-Kulka 1986, Klaudy and Karoly 2005, Klaudy 2003, 2009).