Syntactic translation and semantic implications: The case of Fulfulde and English

It has been a general consensus that translation is an exercise of transferring a message, initially written or spoken in one language, into another language for the benefit of those who do not understand the initial language. The researchers provided some definitions of language since translation is also a language based exercise. It is also to be noted that translation can be based on variety of areas such as literary translation, textual translation, and it can also be based on a linguistic form. In this paper, the researchers are interested in the syntactic aspect of translation in order to determine whether the change in syntactic form from L1 to L2 could imply any change in meaning in the target language and to what level fidelity in translation could be talked of. For the sake of this paper, the researchers have selected, at random, a text, just a short paragraph, from a write-up about the life of the biblical Daniel. The researchers have the translation of the paragraph into Fulfulde and this constitutes the corpus of our syntactic analysis. The researchers mainly concentrated on the verb and the sentence transformation into the target language which, in this case, is Fulfulde. As a result, the research has discovered that even when the message could adequately be transferred into the target text, the structure of the sentence and some language elements change their grammatical class. Thus, the researchers conclude that in the process of translating a sentence, some segments and sub-segments find it difficult to correspond, and that implies the introduction, subtraction or mutation of words in order to maintain the initial message.    Key words: Syntactic, translation, semantic, implications, Fulfulde, French, English.