Information structure and translation: part two

In a previous article, “Information Structure in French and English: How to lose your mind in translation”, I went through the translation of a short magazine article in French which was particularly difficult to translate due to the complexity of the sentence structures.

In this article, I propose to take a step backwards and look more closely at the ways French and English deal with Information Structure (IS).

First, a definition.

“[IS] is the way an utterance is structured given the speaker’s beliefs and assumptions concerning the hearer, in particular what the hearer already knows and what he/she is attending to at the time of the utterance.”[1]

In fact, the speaker/writer is continually organizing his/her discourse to take account of the changes in status of various items of information, moving them from foreground, i.e. “pertinent”, to background, i.e. “contextual”, and back again.

Different languages have different ways of dealing with this. Simplifying somewhat, English seems to use a combination of prosodic marking and syntax, while French relies mainly on syntax. How does this work? Here are some examples from Lambrecht (2010)[2]

Take a situation where someone asks: “What happened to your car?” The context, what is known, is that you have a car. The topic, the unknown, is what happened to it. English would thus put “my car” or “it” in subject position and put final stress on “broke down”.

My car [It] broke down.

In French, while the same structure is possible – “Elle est en panne” – the preferred structure, according to Lambrecht, would be to first place the theme – ma voiture – in sentence initial position, then use a cleft construction to mark the focus with final stress.

Ma voiture, elle est en panne.

Now take the case where there is disagreement concerning the theme item: “I heard your motorcycle broke down”. The English reply to this would simply shift the main stress to “my car”, which has become the focus of attention.

No, my car broke down.

French, however, cannot use stress in this way and must again resort to clefting to get the same result.

Non, c’est ma voiture qui est en panne.

A third example shows how French handles a situation where both the argument and the predicate are unknown.

Context: “You look upset. What happened?”

This time, English cannot use a pronoun subject and must stress both items.

My car broke down.

French not only has a cleft structure but also uses the verb avoir to introduce the first focus item – ma voiture – then a subordinate clause to position the second one.

J’ai ma voiture qui est en panne.

Lambrecht concludes:

« Spoken French shows a near one-to-one mapping between focus structure and phrase structure…(and) makes abundant use of grammatical realignment constructions, especially clefts”.[3]

He even goes so far as to claim that the use of clefting and dislocation constructions in French is the norm rather than the exception in spoken French, where “the canonical transitive clause of the SVO type…hardly ever occurs in actual speech”. In his corpus of 1550 NPs in oral French, only 46 are lexical subjects.[4]

Realignment constructions in French

The main reason behind the use of clefing and dislocation in French is the fact that stress must be placed on the final syllable of any prosodic unit, whether a phrase or a clause. This is clearly the case in the second and third examples above. So, while French does use stress to focus certain items of information, it must first reorganize the sentence structure to place them in final position in some prosodic unit. English on the other hand needn’t reorganize the structure, it simply moves the main stress to the focused item.

However, clefting and dislocation are not the only ways French can reposition information items to mark them as pertinent or contextual. It can, like English, use the passive voice.

La réunion a été annulée.

The meeting has been called off.

However, this option is much more constrained in French than in English, where almost any verbal relationship can be passivized, including moving NPs out of prepositional phrases, impossible to do in French.

John gave the book to Mary > John gave Mary the book > Mary was given the book.

Jean donna le livre à Marie > Jean donna Marie le livre (However: Jean lui donna le livre) > Marie fut donné le livre.

John looked into the problem > The problem will be looked into tomorrow.

Jean enquêta sur Marie > Marie fut enquêté sur par Jean.[6]

Aside from the ubiquitous « on » construction (On a annulé la réunion) , French also uses reflexive verbs in many cases to translate an English passive.

On a cassé la vitre. > La vitre s’est cassée.

Bob a viré Pierre. > Pierre a été viré ou Pierre s’est fait virer.

On vend bien ce livre > Ce livre se vend bien.

In some cases, the « object » argument can move to the subject, or theme, position without a reflexive or passive construction.

Le soleil jaunit le papier peint. > Le papier peint jaunit au soleil.

Note that similar constructions exist in English as well.

They broke the window > The window broke.

Bob fired Pete. > Pete got himself fired

The sun yellows the paper > The paper yellows in the sun.

If you are interested in reading more on this topic, go to Chapter 10 of my Linguistic Handbook of French for Translators and Language Students. You’ll find many more examples there, as well as translation exercises and corrections.

[1] E. Engdahl, (2006) « Information Packaging and Information States”, Empirical Issues in Syntax and Semantics, 6: 93-111.

[2] K. Lambrecht (2010) « Constraints on subject-focus mapping in French and English: a contrastive analysis”, in Comparative and Contrastive Studies of Information Structure, K. Breul and E. Göbbels (eds.), 77-100, Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

[3] Lambrecht (2010:77).

[4] Lambrecht (1987) « On the Status of SVO Sentences in French Discourse”, In Russell Tomlin (ed.) Coherence and Grounding in Discourse, 217-262. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

[5] Mais cette structure est possible avec un pronom : Jean lui donna le livre.

[6] You’ll find many more examples of this in Chapter 10 of A Linguistic Handbook of French for Translators and Language Students.