German directional adverbs with hin- and her- in Swedish translations : A translation study on a special feature of the German language

The German local adverbs, which are merged with one of the local deictic adverbs hin and her and a preposition or ein, are considered to be special features of German. This paper deals with them when they occur together with a verb of motion and focuses on the question of how they, their deictic meaning included, are translated into Swedish. The types investigated are hinunter, herunter, hinab, herab, hinauf, herauf, hinein, herein, hinaus or heraus and they were retrieved from both the LEGS corpus, which consists of non-fiction texts, and from four well-known German novels and their Swedish translations. The occurrences were then categorized according to four translation strategies, namely literal translation, transposition, paraphrase and omission. Finally, some examples were discussed in more detail. The deictic part of those adverbs was in only one case translated by linguistic means, but otherwise it might be understood with the help of other factors, e.g. the readers' world knowledge. Out of the four translation methods, literal translation was the most common, and of these the Swedish adverbs ner, upp, in and ut made up the majority. All transpositions involved Swedish prepositions like nerför, ner längs, uppför and upp på, which only occurred with adverbs denoting vertical movement along an object, e.g. a stairway. The paraphrases and omissions were few, and the latter, in which the adverb was not translated, were mainly used with expressions that were semantically redundant in terms of movement, such as in die Badewanne hineinsteigen.