A Comparative Study of Gerund Translation from English into Spanish, French and Malay

Abstract

This research is descriptive in nature and focuses on translating gerunds, which are grammatical elements that function as nouns and can serve as subjects, objects, or objects of prepositions. This paper is a multilingual comparative study on gerund translation from English into Spanish, French, and Malay. The study aims to describe gerund function, compare translation procedures, and establish translation modelling on gerund. The method used in this research is the qualitative method, describing translation phenomena. In doing so, Vinay and Darbelnet’s (1995) translation model is used to support the research. The corpora used to carry out the research are existing translations of the novels I Am Malala and Things Fall Apart.  All the source texts and target texts are wholly read, and 251 occurrences of gerunds in the source texts are identified, categorised, collected and analysed manually; Then, the translation procedures are analysed and compared. The research reveals that Malay lacks gerund structures, leading to unique transpositional strategies. English is found to use more gerund occurrences than Spanish and French due to preference. Few cases of literal translation procedure are used in Spanish and French when the gerund functions as the object of the preposition, ‘by’. Most of the English gerund occurrences are transposed into non-finite infinitive verbs or finite verbs, which indicates that the oblique translation procedure prevails over direct translation as far as gerund is concerned. The findings are applicable to both human translation and machine translation.  

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