Andersen, Hans Christian | Kirsten Malmkjaer (essay date 1997)
Kirsten Malmkjaer (essay date 1997)
SOURCE: Malmkjaer, Kirsten. “Punctuation in Hans Christian Andersen's Stories and in their Translations into English.” In Nonverbal Communication and Translation: New Perspectives and Challenges in Literature, Interpretation and the Media, edited by Fernando Poyatos, pp. 151-62. Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1997.
[In the following essay, Malmkjaer contends that the normalization of Andersen's unusual punctuation in English translations significantly alters the stories.]
1. PUNCTUATION IN TRANSLATION
Punctuation marks constitute ‘a set of non-alphanumeric characters that are used to provide information about structural relations among elements of a text, including (at least in European languages) commas, semicolons, colons, periods, parentheses, quotation marks and so forth’ (Nunberg 1990:17). The primary function of this set ‘is to resolve structural ambiguities in...
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