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E
LIISA
P
ITKÄSALO
242
’Meistä tulee osallisia. Meistä tulee osallisia, ja me teemme sen,
piru vie. / We’ll become involved. We’ll become involved, and we
will do it, the Devil take (us).’
The text in this example does not in itself indicate an explicit motive for
selecting the conditional. However, it appears that the translator has chosen
the conditional instead of the imperative mainly because the emphatic phrase
would have too strong an affective impact if translated with the imperative.
Example 10 is from modern Finnish fiction. The translator’s choices
might have been influenced by it being recent:
(10a)
Hitto vieköön
, minusta me löysimme nämä rauniot vähän turhan
helposti. (Isomäki 2009: 108.)
(10b)
A fené-be!
Túl könnyen találtunk rá
ART hiisi-ILL Liian helposti
löysimme
VERBPART
ezek-re
a
romok-ra (Isomäki 2010: 118).
nämä-SUBL ART rauniot-SUBL
’Hiiteen/Hitto! Löysimme nämä rauniot liian helposti.’
’(Go) To hell! We found these ruins too easily.’
Here the translator has selected a single-word noun phrase, even though
using the jussive construction
fene egye meg
(trans. may the devil eat him/
her/it) would have been an option. Instead, the translator has chosen a lighter
and more vernacular phrase
a fenébe
(trans. ‘to hell’) that suggests the use of
domesticating translation strategy (Leppihalme 2007: 372–373). The trans-
lator’s choices could further be influenced by the predicate of the construc-
tion
fene egye meg
being a definite conjugation. However, the object of the
construction cannot be deduced from the context.
3.2. Seitsemän veljestä:
jumala paratkoon
I have selected Aleksis Kivi’s novel
Seitsemän veljestä
as part of my re-
search material because it contains a relatively large amount of emphatic
phrases and has been translated into Hungarian. The most common emphatic
phrase in the novel is
jumala paratkoon
which has seven alternative transla-
tions in the Hungarian version. In two instances, the phrase has been re-