Zur Übersetzbarkeit der Abtönungspartikel doch ins Albanische

Abstract

The translation of German modal particles into other languages, especially those poorer in particles, such as the Albanian language, is a challenging enterprise. Their meaning depends heavily on the context. Different meanings have been recorded in the literature: marking what is said as true or known to the listener (Thurmair 1989, Schoonjans 2013, 2018), further nuances such as justification/explanation, reproach, admission, surprise, etc. (see Feyrer 1998, Schoonjans 2013, Müller 2014). The dependency on context and the wide range of meanings make particles an interesting object of investigation in contrastive linguistics and in translation studies, where one investigates the question of the equivalent linguistic means or the translation strategies to be employed. This article examines the translatability of the modal particle doch from German into Albanian. On the basis of the corpus examination, it should be determined to what extent the modal particle doch or the modal nuances expressed through it have been transferred into Albanian. Since modal particles feature mainly in spoken language – but there is no such translated corpus from German into Albanian – a corpus of 692 occurrences of spoken language rendered in literature (short and long fiction, drama) has been compiled for this study, collected from various literary works. They are divided into four groups according to the translation strategies used: omission, transposition, paraphrasing, word-for-word translations. This research study confirms the results of other studies, which show that in almost 50 % of the cases modal particles are not translated, which impacts the quality of translation. If particles are translated, then in the majority of cases the translation strategy of transposition is used, followed by paraphrasing and, only in a small fraction of translations, a word-for-word translation strategy is used.