Climb, creep, and fall in Portuguese and French translations
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5007/2175-7968.2025.e100278Keywords:
Translation, motion, climb, creep, fallAbstract
We analyzed 128 samples containing the movement verbs climb, fall, and creep from three English novels and their professional Portuguese and French translations. In their most basic senses, climb and fall encode the path and a manner of motion, while creep conveys only the manner. In 66% of the climb contexts, the translators replaced this verb with a path verb in Portuguese and a manner-and-path verb in French. They translated fall as Portuguese cair (75%) and French tomber (50%), and all three verbs express similar information about the path and the manner. Rendering the manner in scenes with creep reached around 70% in both languages. In the translations of climb and fall with a satellite, expressing more than one trajectory, the translators kept only one in the target, corroborating the literature on the subject. In French, though, they kept the two directions in cases with dans. In addition to predictable typological effects according to L Talmy's Motion Typology, the moving figure's volition and animation seem to have influenced the translators' choices in the scenes with fall. We observed intratypological similarities and intertypological differences as expected. However, in French, the maintenance of manner was more prevalent. The French translations generally showed a greater diversity of verb types that conflated manner and path. We restrict our claims to the strategies used for translating the three chosen verbs.
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