Rendering Irish autonomous verbs into English. Translational challenges

Irish has a special subjectless verb form known as autonomous (Stenson 2008; Nolan 2012), used in sentences like (1).

1. Oltar                fíon        in    Éirinn

      Drink.AUT      wine      in      Ireland

     “Wine is drunk in Ireland”

In mainstream literature, autonomous verbs have been grouped among other common impersonal strategies in European languages, including impersonal generic subjects, passives, among others (Blevins 2003; Malchukov & Okawa 2011).

The translation of autonomous verbs poses non-negligible challenges to the English translator, mainly due to two orders of factors. Firstly, English lacks autonomous forms of the Irish type; secondly, Irish autonomous verbs (and analogous verbal inflections in the other Celtic languages) have not yet received a systematic characterization in linguistic theory (Ó Siadhail 1989; Blevins 2003; Graver 2011). 

In most written texts, passives without explicit agents are the most common English rendering of Irish autonomous verbs, since the two structures share the property of presenting an event without overtly saying who its “initiator” is. However, as also contended in many grammars of Irish (Greene 1966; inter alia), passive and autonomous entail two completely different semantic representations of an event. Notably, while passive sentences are intransitive and originate from the promotion of the object to subject function, autonomous sentences are active and basically remain subjectless, in that no subject is allowed to be overtly coded on the surface structure. Moreover, autonomous inflections may be found with both transitive and intransitive verbs. 

Thus, the choice of passive as a rendering option for Irish autonomous verbs may turn out to be problematic, let alone misleading in terms of transparency maintenance in the translation process. Another aspect contributing to such criticality inheres in the level of information structure and, precisely, in the particular distribution of more or less relevant contents in English passives and Irish autonomous sentences. As a matter of fact, autonomous verbs are generally used whenever the speaker/writer’s intention is to emphasize the event and no other syntactic unit in the sentence. In this sense, these verb types seem to parallel thetic presentative clauses such as “there is dancing”, or the like. Although difficult to adopt in certain translation contexts, such there-sentences are in fact the most functionally aligned renderings of Irish autonomous verbs, because, similarly to these latter, they allow focusing the main event and mostly lack an explicit subject. 

A further option that has never been exhaustively debated is the use of nominalizing constructions such as “The drinking of wine…” or “The fact of drinking wine…”, which also allow concealing the initiator and, in certain utterance types, they may also appear as focused, as in (2).

2. What is harmful for health is the frequent drinking of wine

Based on a pilot survey conducted on a small-scale corpus of text data from Irish-English websites (ClubLeabhar.com; Conradh na Gaeilge; Údarás na Gaeltachta), in this talk I will discuss the problems related to using passive constructions to translate Irish autonomous verbs. Notably, I will seek to highlight the crucial role of translation choices that do not alter the semantic, syntactic and pragmatic features of these latter, differently from what canonical passives normally do. Nominalizations - and, to some extent, also non-finite verb forms - will be put forward as more suitable choices to keep a more desirable and effective semantic and pragmatic equivalence between an Irish autonomous sentence and its English translation.