L’atténuation en traduction : Étude traductologique des marqueurs de probabilité en français et en suédois

Sammanfattning: This dissertation is a comparative study of how epistemic markers in French and Swedish are treated in translation. The study focuses on epistemic markers indicating high probability, such as säkert, nog, jag tror (att) and epistemic (not deontic) måste in Swedish, and, in French, certainement, sans doute, je crois (que), epistemic devoir etc.The epistemic markers qualify the truth of what is being asserted (cf. epistemic modality), indicate the nature of the source that underlies what is being asserted (cf. evidentiality), and show the speaker’s epistemic attitude towards what is being asserted (doubt, belief etc.). Moreover, the epistemic markers are speech acts softeners, related to politeness in language.The material used consists of extracts from 15 Swedish novels and their French translations, and extracts from 15 French novels and their Swedish translations. More than 1500 examples collected from this material show that there are some translational problems connected to epistemic markers, especially interference – influence between languages – which manifests itself as “translationese”, i.e. features that characterize translated texts compared to source texts in the same language. For example, the epistemic adverb antagligen (Eng. probably) is over-represented to a great extent in Swedish translations from French, while the epistemic particle väl (Eng. I suppose) is rarely used by Swedish translators.Furthermore, the study describes several translational difficulties such as how to keep the subjectivity of the speaker. The indication of subjectivity, which means that the epistemic judgement is made by the speaker alone, is inherent in the particles nog and väl as well as in the mental state predicate jag tror (att) / je crois (que) (Eng. I think), while epistemic adverbs like probablement and sans doute can receive an intersubjective interpretation, indicating that the responsibility for the degree of truth of what is being asserted is shared between the speaker and others.