Pretty complete or completely pretty? Investigating degree modifiers in English and Norwegian original and translated text

This thesis examines the use of degree modifiers in a corpus of English and Norwegian original and translated fiction. Degree modifiers have in the past been described comprehensively in monolingual research but only in recent years been given attention in corpus-based contrastive analysis and translation studies. The aim of the thesis is to describe the behavior of English and Norwegian degree modifiers by combining insights from contrastive linguistics and translation studies. Through a bidirectional analysis of data from the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus, the thesis answers 1) to what extent degree modifiers correspond cross-linguistically, 2) how degree modifiers are rendered by translators, and 3) whether the use of degree modifiers in translated text differs from the use in original text. In order to answer these questions, all instances of a set of four English degree modifiers and four Norwegian degree modifiers were collected from the corpus, annotated for contextual information and analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. The thesis found moderately high mutual correspondence for many of the items and confirmed that their function as either a maximizer or a moderator largely corresponded across languages. It was also found that degree modifiers were often omitted in translation in either direction. Yet, the same items were also systematically added in translation where there was no degree modifier in the source text. The discussion suggests a particular tendency for the Norwegian maximizer helt to be added from a zero-correspondence or translated from a weaker English degree modifier. Finally, the thesis establishes that English degree modifiers are more frequent in translated language than in original language, but the same was not found for Norwegian.