《Implication of Evidentiality in Translation》.pdf

Irmeli Helin Implication of Evidentiality in Translation Abstract Evidentiality is a grammatical and lexical means to express that the source of information is someone else than the sender of the message. But how does the translator detect the indirect information from the implications of the source text or does he or she even add these kinds of implications to the target text? A translation is always an interpretation of what has been said or written. Anyway, since a translation can also be understood as an aid to facilitate the correct interpretation by the target audience, an interpretive subjectivity is always present in reading or listening to translated texts. This paper looks at methods used by translators of German texts into Finnish to transfer evidential information. 1. Evidentiality and evidentials in German and Finnish In this paper I want to discuss an interesting phenomenon I have observed when checking the translations of my students at the Department of Translation Studies in Kouvola when they translated German online news texts into Finnish. It is a fairly new perspective in my own research, which concerns evidentiality as a grammatical and lexical means for the speaker or writer to express that the source of information is someone else than the sender of the message him/herself. The usual assumption is that there is no grammatical means in the Finnish language to express evidentiality (Helin 2004: 13, 14), except, maybe, the potential, and in any case this mood has other modal functions as well. It can also be used by the speaker to express that he or she assumes that a certain fact is true, not only or not at all to imply that the information has been forwarded by someone else than the speaker. A Man of Measure Festschrift in Honour of Fred Karlsso