ARTICLE REVIEW

Hello awesome readers..

This time i’m going to share about an article review that i’ve done ( i dont know if its good or not ) the title of the article is A contrastive study of similes in English and Norwegian.

A contrastive study of similes in English and Norwegian is an article that is made by Irina Aasheim from University of Oslo. There are 119 pages in this article which is talking about A contrastive study of similes in English and Norwegian. 

The aim of the present thesis is to perform a detailed study of two simile frames in an  English-Norwegian contrastive perspective. The starting point of the research is two English similes:  like a/an N [noun] and as ADJ [adjective] as N [noun]. The investigation is carried  out on the basis of the English - Norwegian Parallel Corpus,  the British National Corpus and the Lexicographic Corpus for Norwegian bokmål.  The questions the author seek answers to are :

      1. What are the most frequent translation correspondences of the English like a/an N and as ADJ as N  in the Norwegian language? 

      2. Are the English like a/an N and as ADJ as N the most frequent translation correspondences for their Norwegian counterparts?

 

3.How high is the mutual correspondence between the most frequent translation  correspondences of the two similes in English and Norwegian?

To answer the question above the researcher use contrastive analysis method, she collected several analysis.

Contrastive analysis of the English like a/an N simile

This section deals with the analysis of the English like a/an N simile, its translation into Norwegian, translation of its most frequent Norwegian correspondence into English and analysis of noun group vehicles in both English and Norwegian pair of similes

1.1 Translation of the English like a/an N simile into Norwegian

To begin with, She performed a search of  like a/an N similes in the ENPC, both the fiction and  non- fiction parts. The author’s search query left me with 250 occurrences from fiction texts and 56  occurrences from non-fiction texts.

The most frequent correspondence of the English like a/an Nis the Norwegian som en/ei/et N, i.e. the most frequent way of translating a simile of the like a/an N type is by a direct structural transfer (188 out of 285 instances, or 66%). The next most frequent way of rendering a simile is, according to the obtained results, omission (30 instances out of 188, or 11%). It is followed by such constructions as ligne en/ei/et N (20 instances out of 285, or 7%), lik en/ei/et N (15 instances out of 285, or 5%), minne om en/ei/et N (8 instances out of 285, or 3%) and som + another word (5 instances out of 285, or 2%).

Example :

(22E) Luke was in his pram downstairs and everyone fussed over him, and the older children carried him around like a doll. (ENPC, DL1)

(22N) Luke lå i barnevognen nedenunder, og alle dullet med ham, og de eldre barna bar ham rundt  som en dukke. (ENPC, DL1T)

The author’s analysis shows that ligne en/et/ei N,  lik en/et/ei N and  minne om en/et/ei N are more frequently used in the translation of elaborated similes (22 cases out of 30 instances) rather than of simple ones (21 out 255 instances). She assume that the complexity of the image that must be rendered in an elaborated simile drives translators to seek other ways of translation rather than a simple use of the construction som en/et/ei N which, as we can see, does not always fit the context. She would also like to mention some cases when the like a/an N similes were translated into Norwegian with the help of the word ―som‖ but formally she could not classify these instances as the use of the construction som en/et/ei N.

1.2 Translation of the Norwegian som en/ei/et N simile into English

Having established that the most frequent translation correspondence of the English like a/an N frame is the Norwegian som en/ei/et N simile, She performed an analogous study for the Norwegian construction. Her search in the ENPC left me with 489 examples in fiction texts and 248 in non-fiction ones. After a careful sorting I was left with 346 and 129 similes , 475 similes in total. Her approach to identifying similes was the same as for the English frame, therefore she did not include in her research the examples where ―som‖ operates as a conjunction and not as a comparison, and where ―som‖ is part of the constructions så ADJ som N and like ADJ som N  :

Så sent som i 1956 het det i rapporten fra den engelske Royal Commission on Marriage and Divorce at det måtte være utenkelig at man innførte arverett for barn som en gift mann fikk med en annen kvinne enn sin hustru, "for it could not fail to result in a blurring of moral values in the public mind. (ENPC, LSPL1)

1.3 Mutual correspondence of  like a/an N and som en/ei/et N

            This part of analysis we can clearly see that English and Norwegian has displayed a lot of structural similarity in constructing a simile which is first proved by the fact that like a/an N and som en/ei/et N showed to be each other’s most frequent counterparts in translation and then supported by their quite high mutual correspondence with the score above 50%. It would be interesting to look at the other correspondences in more detail, but that is beyond the scope of this thesis.

The strengthen of this article is the researcher uses a very simple and understandable words to explain the background of this article, everything is well-arranged and the problem is explained clearly by some examples and references.

On the other hand this article does not contain the detail data of the fiction and non-fiction texts which is being tested.

The conclusion is, in making the background of this article the researcher uses a simple words and understandable and everything is well-arranged. However this article also has the weaknes which is in the collecting data, the data is not detail yet.

Thats about my article review, i know there are mistakes that i’ve done on this posting. Hope it can be beneficial for you who read this post. You can read the article through site below this :

https://www.duo.uio.no/bitstream/handle/10852/16981/aasheim-Master2011.pdf?sequence=2