A Study of Translation of Relative Clauses from English into Thai and from Thai into English

Abstract

This study examined translation strategies which were used in translating English relative clauses (ERCs) with the relativizers ‘who,’ ‘which,’ and ‘that’ into Thai and Thai relative clauses (TRCs) with the relativizers ‘/tʰîː/’ and ‘/sɯ̂ŋ/’ into English. In addition, the types of relative clauses, namely restrictive and non-restrictive, in English were investigated for their effects on the translation strategies in the English-Thai translation. The data comprised 714 sentence pairs whose source texts contained relative clauses. English-Thai translation consisted of 348 sentence pairs from two English novels and their Thai translations. With regard to Thai-English translation, the data covered 366 sentence pairs from two Thai novels and the English translations. The hypotheses stated that the translation strategies would be in two groups: literal translation with a relativizer and translation adjustment, and relative clause types in English affected translation strategies in the English-Thai language direction. In order to analyze the translation strategies, frameworks for the analysis of the translation of relative clauses were constructed based mainly on Chesterman’s (1997) translation strategies, complemented by Nida’s (1964) and Saibua’s (2007) translation adjustment techniques. In relation to the investigation of the effects of the relative clause types in English, a chi-square test was performed. The findings of this study confirmed the hypothesis with respect to the translation strategies in that the two main translation strategies were the literal translation with a relativizer and the translation adjustment. Nonetheless, the translation adjustment could be further divided into three groups: Antecedent Adjustment, RC Adjustment, and Complete Adjustment, depending on the degrees of adjustment on the head nouns and the relative clauses. Regarding the types of relative clauses in English, the results of the chi-square test confirmed the hypothesis and demonstrated a statistically significant association between the relative clause types in English and the use of the relativizers ‘/tʰîː/’ and ‘/sɯ̂ŋ/’ in the Thai translations. The implications of this study were twofold, namely the theoretical and translation aspect and the pedagogical aspect. The findings mirrored the fact that there were various translation strategies along the translation continuum between literal translation and free translation. In addition, the findings confirmed the usage trend of the Thai relativizers ‘/tʰîː/’ and ‘/sɯ̂ŋ/’ in English-Thai translation concerning the English relative clause types. This study also contributed to translation teaching and learning in that the proposed analysis frameworks and the translation strategies found could be used as guidelines on relative clause translation between English and Thai.