Structural Propensities

This book focuses on the translation of English academic texts into German, closely analysing the structural and discourse properties of original sentences and their possible translations. It consists of six chapters, with more than a hundred carefully discussed examples, and presents the author’s results of a series of research projects which have successively dealt with the typologically determined conditions for discourse-appropriate uses of word order, case, voice (perspective) and structural explicitness in simple and complex sentences or sequences of sentences. The theoretical and methodological assumptions of the book follow a basically generative approach in studying the interaction between semantic-pragmatic and phonological-syntactic properties of the linguistic forms as they are involved in the perception of written language. The linguistic and psycholinguistic models accessed are also introduced in detail to promote comprehension for the interested reader with an alternative theoretical background, whether scholar, student or translator.

Elke Teich, Darmstadt, Germany, in Target Vol. 20:2 (2008):
The book at large succeeds in conveying a comprehensive picture of restructuring in English-German translations as ultimately motivated by discourse appropriateness. The strength of Doherty's approach lies in the fact that it relates observations about grammar and insights about discourse. [...] Another strength of the book is the balance it strikes between abstract hypotheses and concrete linguistic data. [...] Finally, the book invites some interesting questions for future research. [...] the book was a pleasure to read. I recommend it to everybody interested in grammar, translation and English-German contrastive typology.