TRANSLATING SOME LEFT-DETACHED CONSTRUCTIONS FROM FRENCH INTO ALBANIAN

Abstract

While teaching Translation Practice, we have noticed that the majority of students have difficulties in understanding and interpreting French detached constructions, particularly when they are placed at the beginning of a sentence. To begin with, we define this type of clauses, called ‘detached constructions’ (constructions détachées) in French and explain why they are problematic from a French-Albanian translation perspective. Finally, we propose a syntactic and semantic analysis of Albanian literary translations in order to discover some recurrent translation strategies of the left-detached constructions which would be useful in the pedagogic as well as professional translation context.

Keywords: left- detached construction, main clause, logical relationship, translation, circumstantial value.