A Study of the translation of thai serial verb constructions with directional verbs and their semantic and syntactic equivalence in english

Abstract

The main purposes of this study are (1) to analyze the semantic and the syntactic characteristics of Thai SVCs with DVs in parallel with their English translations, (2) to examine whether the translations of those SVC concepts have the semantic and syntactic equivalence when compared with those in Thai, and (3) to propose a possible direction in translating the concepts of those Thai SVCs into English. This research explores Thai Serial Verb Constructions (SVCs) with six Directional Verbs (DVs-/paj0/'go'/maa0/'come',/khaw2/'enter'/?@@k1/ 'exit',/khvn2/'ascend', and/long0/'descend') interms of their syntactic and semantic aspects in comparison with their English translations. The study is based on the 1,541 SVCs found in the selected sample/fvvn3 khwaam0land4/'Looking back', which is an autobiography written in Thai and translated into English by the Chulalongkorn Translation Center. It is found that Thai SVCs with Dvs totally denote seven concepts: directional, purposive, aspectual, time, sequential, resultative, and successful. All of these relate to the spatial and temporal cognitive concepts except the attitudinal aspectual notion, which also relates to the expressive concept. These SVCs concepts are found to consist of DVs occurring either in the preceding or following position of certain lexical verbs. The English forms representing those SVCs concepts are represented by different linguistic realizations including single words, phrases, clauses/sentences, or even no form. These forms are varied upon both syntactic and semantic characteristics of SVCs in relation to their co-occurring lexical verbs and other linguistic elements in the contexts. In respect of the semantic equivalence, the findings. Reveal the existence of the meaning gain, the meaning loss, the meaning gain and loss, and the equal meaning occurring in the English translations. And in term of the syntactic equivalence, the forms of SVCs cannot be mapped with the forms of English translations because different forms of SVCs can be equivalent to the same form in English or the same form of SVCs can be equivalent to the different forms in English. Consequently, there is no one-to-one correspondence between Thai SVCs with DVs and their translations in English. However, among those translated forms found in the corpus, some linguistic realizations are employed more frequently than others and then proposed as the potential forms in representing the concepts of Thai SVCs with DVs in English.