THE MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND SCIENCE OF

THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION 
 

THE MOSCOW POWER ENGINEERING INSTITUTE

(TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY) 
 

The Institute of Linguistics 
 

Department of Applied Linguistics and Translation Techniques 
 
 

DIPLOMA PAPER 
 
 

Speciality: Translation and Translation Techniques 
 
 

Subject: “The Role of Grammatical Transformations While Translating

(based on “For Whom The Bell Tolls” by Ernest Hemingway)” 
 
 
 
 

Performed by: Druzhinin Nikita 

Supervisor: Dorohina M. . 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Moscow 2009

Abstract

     The present thesis focuses on the Role of Grammatical Transformations on the basis of the novel “For Whom The Bell Tolls” by Ernest Hemingway. It comprises the introductory part, three subject chapters – lexical, morphological and grammatical transformations, and the conclusion.

     Chapter 1 overviews basic terminology and aims of the thesis and refers to the works of such scholars as Matuzkova E.P., Shekhovtseva M.D., Frolov A.A., Shveitser L.D., Levitskaya T.R., Fiterman A.M., Barhudarov L.S., Komissarov V.K., Vinogradov V.S., and Arturo Pascual. The first chapter outlines the scheme of the following chapter defining levels of analysis in translation.

     Chapter 2 begins with highlighting the importance of preserving the structure of the source text and induces explanation of the author’s literary style whose novel laid the basis of the thesis practical parts. The chapter involves practical research of three types of transformations. Each subdivision on transformation type points out the most typical transformations as in translation practice as in the understudied novel in particular.  The chapter ends with the table containing the most typical transformation with certain examples.

  The conclusion underlines the result of the research carried out. It defines the main role of transformations techniques and marks the reason for those transformations.  
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

Introduction

     Translation implies correct and comprehensive rendering what is expressed in one language by means of the other language. [4] The present work is focused on the grammatical transformations that are vital while converting linguistic units of the source text into the text of the target language.

     According to the definition by V.N. Komissarov, literary translation is such a kind of translation, which is supposed to create a literary text in the target language and influence the reader emotionally and aesthetically. For this reason a lot of critics believe that the literary translation is a piece of art, which is dominated by masters only who follow only aesthetic criteria while making a translation. The reasons mentioned afore give the ground to consider the literary translation to be as a linguistic phenomenon as a literary one. Literary translation is not supposed to give exact translation of the original text but to render the meaning and the message in order to make the translated text more artistic. [5]

     The present thesis is focused on the matter of grammatical transformations and in particular their role in translation of any text whether it be literary work or text of business and technical contents. Relevance of the thesis concerns the fact that grammatical transformations are an inseparable part while translating a text of any complexity. While translation, the first mean that a translator employs is grammatical transformation, thus, converting the sentence of the source language into the sentence of the target language. Nowadays quality of translation faces high standards. That’s why analysis of different aspects of translation is vital in order to perfect translation techniques and mastering translator’s skills.  The notion of Russian English is rather well known among translators and people who deal with translation. Russian English is considered as a kind of translation drawback. As soon as polemics on Russian English appeared, translators of the country started to pay more attention to the quality of translations and the ways of getting rid of Russian English manner of translating, which implies overuse of Russian grammatical constructions while translating into English and few transformations. That is exactly the reason why consideration of all possible grammatical transformations is so vital to advance and perfect translator’s skills. But it is necessary to study out the essence and the notion of grammatical transformations and what aspects are associated with it.

      The matter is that the internal structure of the original language and the target language may differ considerably. Thus, grammatical transformations are very crucial in this respect. These differences of the languages are the main reason of grammatical transformations. Such differences can be partial or absolute. Absolute differences can be observed when the Russian language lacks a grammatical form, which is present in the English language, or on the contrary. There are cases when a grammatical category of one language is broader than that of the other. Sometimes when the principal parts of the sentence are replaced, the complete grammatical transformation takes place. When the subordinate parts of the sentence are replaced, here we have partial grammatical transformation. But more often these kinds of transformation take place simultaneously. It is worth mentioning that there are cases when one or another grammatical category is present in both languages but does not coincide in all forms.

     According to Chernyakhovskaya L.A., different syntax of Russian and English is one of the major reasons for grammatical transformations. In addition, different linguistic means emphasize the communicative message of the sense-groups, which employ various parts of the sentence. So, the English subject, which is usually in the beginning of the sentence, confers less communicative message in comparison with that of the final parts of the sentence.  This phenomenon is associated with theme and rheme in terms of translation, in particular, in English-Russian translation. So, semantic word order coincides with syntactic division of the sentence into the subject and the predicate (the subject is theme, the predicate is rheme) concerning rise of the communicative message. It is the factor, which is the reason for syntactic transformations while translating from Russian into English and backwards. For instance, the Russian thematic group that has free syntax is translated as the subject into English; this transformation helps to keep the message of the sense group. While translating it is necessary to bear in mind that an English speaking reader intuitively perceives the beginning of the sentence as the nucleolus information.

     Grammatical features of linguistic units involve a range of linguistic phenomena: word form, word combination, sentence, word order, grammatical meaning of forms, context functions of forms and meanings.   When translating, one should take into account not only the message that a linguistic unit communicates but also its grammatical features, which can influence considerably the structure of the whole sentence being translated.

     One should consider all the factors, which can influence the use of grammatical transformations:

• Syntactic function of the sentence;
• Lexical background, and lexical contents:
• The way of implying the message:
• Context (background) of the sentence;
• Expressive and stylistic function.

   Due to the logical structure of the sentence, a translator should not only change but also sometimes keep the foreign construction when it concerns exact rendering of the logical stress of the message. Contextual background of the sentence may also require its grammatical transformation. Such examples can be observed mostly while translating English period and a range of sentences beginning with one and the same personal pronoun.

   Translation transformations are subdivided into lexical and grammatical ones according to units of the source language that are considered as initial units in the process of transformation.

   A translator very often starts translation with a word, in particular, with changing its form that is why the issues of word formation, creation of new words, are of special importance for the process of translation.

   The necessity or importance of grammatical transformations has certain consequences. Abundant transformation causes free translation resulting in misinterpretation, incomprehensibility and artificial style. On the other hand, lack of translation transformations results in over-literal rendering. L.K. Latyshev defined the subject as follows: “ A translator who does not have enough experience in translating may carry to excess in two ways: the first is literal copying of the source text stemmed from unclear understanding of what is exact translation; and the second is extremely free translation with great number of unreasoned transformations as a result of avoiding literalism. In terms of Grammar understanding the sentence is to identify it with an appropriate pattern or a model. In other words, it means understanding the way that sentence is made up”. [17]

    The matter of word-formation techniques and transformations is considered in linguistics concerning translations of scientific and socio-political texts. It mostly concerns the fact that new formations are typical of the above listed genres (different types of neologisms, for instance). In this regard there is not much attention paid to the peculiarities of word building transformations while translating a literary work.

   The subject of the research is the role of grammatical transformations, classification of the basic word-building, morphological and syntactical transformations in translation from the Source language (English) into the Target Language (Russian), pointing out typical difficulties to achieve equivalent translation and, if possible, finding the ways of achieving it, frequency of using certain grammatical transformations and defining their role in translation, in particular, in the literary text to render the author’s style and emotional background of the literary work, etc.

   The main way of solving the problem set is comparative and contrastive method and analysis of translator’s decisions with contextual background taken into account. The basic material of the present thesis is the novel “For Whom the Bell Tolls” by Ernest Hemingway.

   The purposes determined the structure of the thesis. It includes the introductory part, three chapters with thematic sections and the conclusion.

      Chapter 1

      1.1. Overview of Basic Terminology and Aims

      Prior to discussing any problem or aspect, it is necessary to define clearly the subject itself and a range of means, which describe this particular subject. Translation is not an exception and always has to be defined according to the aims, which a researcher persuades. The present work is focused on the grammatical means of translation, which also have their diversity and peculiarities.

      Nowadays there is a number of linguistic theories concerning translation and interpreting as activity of transforming lingual units of one language into lingual units of the other language. Various scholars suggest different ways of understanding translation. Some suggest considering translation as a kind of psychological process, others think it to be based on grammar rules and norms of linguistics interlaced with cultural peculiarities of the source and the target language. Works and investigations of the following scholars were used for the present thesis: Матузкова Е.П., Шеховцева М.Д., Фролов А.А. «Перераспределение границ предложения и сверхфразовых единств в переводе»; Швейцер Л.Д. «Теория перевода: статус, проблемы, аспекты»; Левицкая Т.Р., Фитерман А.М. «Пособие по переводу с английского языка на русский»; Бархударов Л.С. «Язык и перевод»; Мизецкая В.Я. «Некоторые особенности перевода англоязычного драматургического текста»;  Комиссаров В.К. «Теория перевода»; Виноградов В.С. «Перевод. Общие и лексические вопросы»; Артуро Паскуаль «Эрнест Хемингуэй» - биография и творчество.

      Comparative analysis is the most frequent method of studying translation, its quality and pointing out some typical features of translation and estimates the techniques a translator used to reach the target of translation. The present work suggests the following investigation: overviewing the subject of translation, translation techniques, pointing out the principle grammatical transformations – lexical, morphological and syntactical and explaining on particular examples which role this or that type of transformation employed plays there. Thus, it will create the foundation to define the transformation role for each concrete example and then generalize it as a conclusion. All the theoretical material and terminology which precede the practical part of the thesis will be used for commenting each particular example.

       As a means of interlingual communication, translation is a transfer of meaning across cultures.  More specifically, translation is the process and result of creating in a target, or translating, language (TL) a text, which approximately the same communicative value as the corresponding text in the source language (SL). The target text, or translation, that is created by the translator never perfectly reflects, either in meaning or tone, the original source text (ST). The form and content of the original and its translation differ. This is due to the constraints imposed on the translator by formal and semantic differences between the source language and the target language. Nevertheless, the users of the target language usually accept a translation as a functional, structural, and semantic equivalent of the original. Even a very simple translation illustrates formal and semantic difference between the original and its translation. Leaving aside considerations of context, the English sentence “The student is reading a book” can be translated as “Студент читает книгу”. On a formal, or grammatical level, the Russian sentence is devoid of the meaning of the articles and the present continuous tense. The Russian sentence does not contain any explicit indication that a specific student is reading some unspecified book. Nor does it indicate that the process of reading is most likely taking place at the moment of speaking. However the Russian sentence carries some grammatical meaning which is absent in the English sentence. The verb “читает” is marked for person, number and conjugation while the noun “книгу” is feminine and is used in the accusative case. On a semantic level, the Russian sentence also contains some information absent from the English original. Some of the information lost or added in the process of translation may be irrelevant for effective communication and some of the information may be supplied or neutralized by context. It is important to understand that equivalence achieved in translation is relative.  
 

2. Levels of analysis and synthesis in translation

     The words “analysis” is of Greek origin. It means “the process of separating something into its constituent parts”. The word “synthesis” is also of Greek origin and means the combination of components to form a connected whole”. The translator is constantly involved in analyzing and synthesizing meaning, both while understanding the source text and creating the target text.

     The process of analysis and synthesis in which the translator is involved in takes place at least on 6 levels:

• Word level
• Phrase level
• Clause or sentence level
• Paragraph
• Text level
• Pragmatics, or sociocultural, level

     A word is a single distinct meaningful element of speech or writing, used to form sentences with other similar elements. Words are the basic unit of language.

     A phrase is a small group of words standing together as a conceptual unit and not containing a finite verb. A finite verb has a specific tense, voice, person and number. It is used in the predicate of a sentence.

     A clause is a sentence which is used as part of a compound or complex sentence.

     A paragraph is a distinct section of a piece of writing, indicated by a new line, indentation, or numbering.

     A text is a written, printed or spoken piece of language regarded as a complete whole in terms of its form and content. A text may consist of one paragraph or, in rare cases, one sentence and word.

     Pragmatics is the study of language as it is used in a sociocultural context, including its effect on the participants in the process of communication. The translator must be aware of the situational aspects of language usage in order to produce authentic, i.e. culturally adequate, translations.  The translator has to work at all the six levels of text analysis and synthesis at the same time.  

3. Preserving the meaning structure of the source text

     This aspect is vital in terms of preserving the unique author’s style because sometimes the text is the result or a product of some specific author’s technique of writing. For example, Ernest Hemingway was an adept of simple plain style of narration and it would be a translation defect if his literary style was very grandiloquent and pompous in the target language. That’s why the translator must keep in mind the notion of the text structure. “Structure” means “the arrangement of and relations between the parts of something complex”. Any discourse is a complex structure of meaning which is realized at the levels of words, phrases, sentences, paragraphs, and complete texts in a particular sociocultural environment. The relationships between all the levels produce the ultimate effect of gestalt, which is an organized whole perceived as more than the sum of its parts. The ultimate challenge for any translator is to preserve as much of its complex meaning structure in the translation as possible. Sometimes while comparing the source text with the target text, a researcher can see that sometimes the whole passages are omitted. The reasons for such omission can be various but the most common one is that the translator didn’t succeed in finding linguistic means to reflect peculiar sociocultural aspect of the passage. These are usually jokes on politics, specific professional humor typical of a country etc. It is clear that after translation this joke can lose its specific colouring in the target language, but nevertheless it gives a valuable piece of information highlighting the idea to the reader.

     In this respect some ways of making translation decisions can be suggested. At the sentence level, the most common transformations every translator makes are:

• Omission
• Addition
• Transposition
• Change of grammatical forms
• Loss compensation
• Concretization
• Generalization
• Antonymic translation
• Meaning extension
• Metonymic translation
• Sentence integration
• Sentence fragmentation.

   The most relevant means of translation among the above listed are omission, addition, transposition, sentence integration and sentence fragmentation that are directly connected with the grammatical means of translation. All the rest means can be counted to the stylistic means of translation. The suggested method of investigation is comparing the source text of Ernest Hemingway’s novel “For Whom the Bell Tolls” with the target translation made by E.Kalashnikova and pointing out cases of employing grammatical transformations.

   1.4. Author’s Style and Its Significance for Translation

   It is impossible to omit various text peculiarities of extra linguistic importance while translating any text or a literary work. The thesis is based on Ernest Hemingway’s novel “For Whom the Bell Tolls”. It is very important to take into consideration author’s individual literary techniques when a translator chooses any kind of transformation, because any author has his own individual vision of how to create the text and how the reader should interpret it. Ernest Hemingway is among such writers who consider grammatical pattern of the sentence as a part of his artistic design. That is the reason why a translator should get to know the rules which Hemingway intended to imply in his works and the aims he tried to persuade. Otherwise a translator will mislead the reader and fail to preserve the unique style of the author.

   Ernest Miller Hemingway (July 21, 1899 — July 2, 1961) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and a journalist. He was a part of the 1920s expatriate community in Paris, as well as the veterans of World War One later known as "the Lost Generation". Hemingway's distinctive writing style is characterized by economy and understatement, in contrast to the style of his literary rival William Faulkner. It had a significant influence on the development of twentieth-century fiction writing. His protagonists are typically stoic men who exhibit an ideal described as "grace under pressure." Many of his works are now considered canonical in American literature. Ernest Hemingway’s literary style is well known and close to linguistic minimalism. But his understatement, scarce speech patterns are only surface impression but in reality every expression is meaningful which should be traced between lines. Hemingway was very resentful against attempts to find any underlying meaning in his works as if something that should be understood was not clear. Nevertheless accentuated detailed description involves numerous symbols. The English writer Syril Conolly wrote about Hemingway’s prose structure: “This style implies that a body tells more than mind does; it is vital to describe such emotions as love, fear, joy of fight, despair and sexual lust but it is extremely poor to imply intellectual ideas”.

   In terms of aesthetics Hemingway had an obsession of being objective. According to his concept of literary oeuvre, prose should be perceived on the physical level and it is necessary to expel any signs of intellectual consideration and fantasies.  Detailed and very exact description of events must be the guide line and the reader should feel it clearly, not only imagine forms and notions but also inosculate with objects and notions the author suggests.

   Hemingway creates such a vivid and effective unity of his creative manner with very scarce means, he is extremely taciturn. In this respect, his style has nothing to do with detailed and grandiloquent literary tradition typical of such American writers as Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville who could be considered as Hemingway’s forerunners in some aspects.

   Hemingway, as a writer who started his career with journalism, aspired to freeze and write down the expressive and laconic vernacular language of streets. He anticipated the English writer Syril Conolly’s adage expressed in 1938:  “Language of our days is journalistic language, and the secret of journalism is to write as people speak in reality”. Hemingway’s principal technique was to stick to reality and everyday life. When Hemingway was a reporter and a correspondent, he tried to follow the same models as those of literary works implying his inspiration and fantasy into the facts depicted. He was interested in man’s actions, character’s type and atmosphere. That’s why he implied impressionism manner in his literary works which makes a possibility to catch vivid atmosphere the most important principle. Hemingway tried to convey feelings and emotions which are experienced in the course of events, distorting or even omitting information of higher importance. He took a well-known rule of journalism very personally:         “ Don’t let the reality spoil good news”. He considered a report as a minor genre of a novelist. [16]

   Hemingway wrote articles for two magazines of Oak Park: The trapeze and Tabula. His first experiments of his literary technique involved imitating Jack London’s style and articles in which he patterned himself on Ring Lardner who was a symbol of the entire epoch of the American journalism. Sarcastic, masterly and intentionally vulgar style of Lardner with interrupted phrases was perfect for sport reviews and comments. It is Lardner’s style that Hemingway adopted as a model.

   As a result, that he was inclined to such masters of picturesque description as Jack London and Mark Twain was initially combined with his inclination to the newspaper style of writing that was aggressive and straightforward. Besides, he had been reading much the writers who were considered a model of aestheticism – Henry James, William Butler Yeats. These two literary sources formed the creative individuality of Hemingway although they might seem rather controversial ranging between vulgarity and aestheticism.

   Like a lot of his contemporaries, Hemingway strived to create such kind of prose which would put an end to the baroque style typical of the 19^th century. His developing skill of a journalist allowed him to deny grandiloquence and focus on everyday life what resulted in peculiar realism of his literary works emphasizing correspondence with reality as the major principle.

   Just after Hemingway got a job at Kansas City Star, he was given a brochure with 10 stylistic requirements pointed out. The editors intended to make all the authors follow common style and set up a single standard of text published where objectivity and laconic language were primary. In brief the requirements were as follows:

• Make up brief, simple and clear phrases;
• Avoid Passive Voice if Active Voice is possible;
• Avoid two words if one is enough;
• Employ descriptive, straightforward and functional language;
• Use verbs which convey more detailed description of an action:
• Avoid adjectives except the cases when they convey exact notion;
• Expel all the grandiloquent adorning;
• Tend to narrate positively describing what really exists but not what could exist. [16]

     Speaking about the career of a writer, Hemingway’s contacts with other authors who visited Gertrude Stein and Ezra Pound’s society appeared of more importance though they belonged to the previous generation. For example, Sherwood Anderson whom Hemingway had met before his travel to Paris became his first literary critic. Hemingway was fascinated while reading Anderson’s collection of stories titled “Winesburg, Ohio” (1919) where Anderson implied colloquial language with scarce expressive means. It was Anderson who prompted Hemingway the idea of that it would be impossible to consider the work completed without rereading it several times.

     The English writer of the older generation Ford Madox Ford shared his technique flash-back with Hemingway (retrospective, or a leap into the past). This narrative technique consists in that the actions in the present tell about events in the past. This experience became fundamental for the writer because he lacked the way to convey discontinuity of life events.

      It is worth noticing that while reading Hemingway’s works the reader often comes across foreign speech piercing through the entire text as the original as the translated one because translators leave those phrases intact. Many Hemingway’s heroes speak English though English is not their native language; it is supposed that they speak other languages. The author overcomes this difficulty so that native language of a character is easily recognized by its syntactical structure and certain semantic connotations. Hemingway embeds English into expressive structure of the other languages in such a way that one always is able to recognize the English language of a foreigner from that of a native speaker. For example, the Spanish people who speak English in such novels as “Fiesta” and “For Whom The Bell Tolls” or the Italians in “Farewell to Arms!”.  This peculiarity is lost in the translated texts because only native speakers of English are able to appreciate it.           Hemingway persuades the same purpose when he introduces a lot of foreign words into his texts, mostly Spanish and Italian, thus creating mixed jargon. [16]

     Hemingway opted for telegraphic style instead of prolixity. That telegraphic style allowed the author to lighten the character, a subject or an action with bright and brief phrases which are more effective than any additions and explanations. Brief and quick as lightning phrases join one another in a syncopated rhythm, thus, embodying the syntax with scarce means as its principal element. Due to simplicity and abundant repetitions, one can perceive it like ingenuous and awkward prose which is absolutely different from what is generally considered to be fine literature. But what is true is that this style is carefully thought over and very well disciplined.

     Few adjectives are one of the characteristic features of Hemingway’s style. The author posed the noun on the top of all the naming means because the noun always conveys the essence of a phenomenon.

     He believed that nouns implied the notions and qualities which adjectives described. The reader was free to imagine some others if reader’s personal experience told to do it. Hemingway used adjectives which described only colour, shape, etc.

     Hemingway tried to express the reality that everyone could see as much as possible basing on the distinctive character of every situation and searching for the unique method of reflecting the moment and the emotion that this moment bears. The thing is that Hemingway attempted to catch a certain feeling for a reader to perceive with the help of sophisticated technique but he never tried to point what feeling it should be like. In other words, life teaches us to write as well as literature teaches us to live.

     Hemingway always tried to evade sublimity, which estranges the author and the subject he writes about and it becomes more abstract. Hemingway aspired to reach the opposite that was to be as close as possible to the matter of description. According to Candido Perez Galliego, Hemingway’s literary style can be defined by 5 principles:

• to prefer what is concealed to what is evident;
• to prefer what is insignificant to what seems grandiose;
• to prefer something momentary to the eternal things;
• to prefer spontaneous to intellectual meaning that it is necessary to escape grandiloquence.

   As for the novel “For Whom the Bell Tolls”, the protagonist of Robert Jordan is an American writer who joined the military actions not only for the sake of ideology but also for the sake of moral dogmas. His struggle is aimed at his own liberation. Hi is sure that human solidarity is vital as every person is not an island and the entire humankind feels death or salvation of anyone. That is why he believes that everyone does what he can do. Probably, you are unable to do anything for yourself but you can do something for the other. Besides, the fact that he loves a young Spanish woman Maria who witnessed disasters of the war symbolizes the moral unity against the background of his impending death. Hemingway disappointed Spanish republicans exiled from the country with such a passionate and thoughtful approach to the idea. The republicans expected him to write more bellicose novel. But nevertheless, the reader liked the novel in spite of the fact that this novel marked the beginning of Hemingway’s literary crisis. His unique fresh style that had been considered earlier as a kind of experiment was adopted and imitated by other American novelists and become a common literary technique of any second-rate author. So, Hemingway had nothing to amaze the public. He could not surpass his own expectations and excel his imitators. 

   So, peculiarities of the author’s literary techniques used in the analyzed novel give ground to consider the following. It is important not only to transform the text in accordance with translation techniques and rules, difference between the source and target languages but also rendering the impression which the author wanted to render for the reader in spite of his or her native language.

The next chapter involves examples of grammatical transformations based on the novel “For Whom the Bell Tolls” and each example will be commented on concerning transformations employed, reasons for transformations chosen and how the translator keeps the author’s style. [16]

Chapter 2

2.1. Lexical Transformations

     The matter of lexical transformations is considered in linguistics concerning translation of scientific and social and political texts because new word formations are typical of the above texts (for instance, neologisms of various kind). However, little attention is paid to the features of lexical transformations in terms of literary translation. Mostly, the matter of lexical transformations concerns stylistic norms of the language because lexical transformations are connected mostly with such translation techniques as 1) generalization; 2) omission; 3) concretization; 4) antonymic translation; 5) meaning extension or sense development 6) loss compensation.  

      Generalization is used when something in the target language is usually expressed using concepts with broader meaning or when the preserving the original concepts with narrower meaning would result in an awkward translation.

     The original text contains the Middle English pronoun thee. The translator usually faces a challenge in such cases because there should be a choice between the archaic word with certain stylistic colouring and certain stylistic generalization, almost neutralization. In this particular case the translator opted for stylistic generalization and her choice might be explained by the historical context. The Russians had certain idea of Spanish guerillas of that time. If the translator kept the archaic form in the translation, it would sound at least awkward and provoke a smile of the Russian reader. Nevertheless, here the author’s gesture interferes again because Hemingway assigned such awkward phrases to foreigners who spoke English in his works. Thus, English readers could exactly distinguish this inappropriate use of the word thee. But at the same time, if we know the plot of the novel, we should note that the character, who pronounced How do they call thee?, respected very much Robert Jordan, the person who this phrase was addressed to. Therefore, we may suggest that such enigmatic usage of the pronoun thee might have double sense. The translation was effected at the word level.

      Omission is used when the clause is redundant, from the point of the target language, and would make the target sentence sound unnatural if it were to be translated. There are cases when certain words are just omitted without compensation and mentioning with the help of some lexical units.

      Concretization is used when something in the target language is usually expressed using concepts with narrower meaning or when preserving the original concepts with broader meaning would result in awkward translation.

  Sometimes concretization causes not only choice of more exact word for translation but also transposition in the sentence and change of syntactical structure of the sentence.

     Sometimes a translator adapts rather general word combinations to the context and translates them with more precise meaning than they were implied in the source text. Due to this translator’s decision, the target text becomes clearer and reflects the contextual background better.