Open AccessNederlandse partikels in het Portugees
Author(s) -
Arie Pos
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
internationale neerlandistiek
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2214-5729
pISSN - 1876-9071
DOI - 10.5117/ivn2010.2.pos
Subject(s) - linguistics , romance languages , portuguese , modal , focus (optics) , romance , contrastive analysis , context (archaeology) , germanic languages , translation (biology) , computer science , sociology , history , philosophy , art , literature , physics , german , chemistry , biochemistry , archaeology , messenger rna , gene , polymer chemistry , optics
Dutch discourse, modal and focus particles are frequently considered to be a translator’s nightmare. This article takes translation into Portuguese as a case in point. Although at first sight translation seems to be problematic because of the lack of ready equivalents, a contrastive survey of different ways of expressing modal aspects in Portuguese and a more context-oriented functional approach to translation reveal that modal functions of Dutch particles can be expressed quite adequately in the target language. Can further contrastive research of Germanic and Romance languages help to clarify how particles really work?