How and What to LOVE in English and Swedish: a contrastive study of the translation of semantic fields

Abstract

The aim of the present study is to examine how the words belonging to the semantic fields of LOVE and ÄLSKA are translated and how the source language influences the target language. A corpus search in the fiction part of the ESPC was carried out to extract a data collection of appropriate size. The method used was a contrastive analysis, where the translation strategies were first identified and then compared between English and Swedish, and between original and translation, in order to identify similarities and differences. The results demonstrated that English has a more frequent and broad use of verbs belonging to the semantic field of LOVE, while Swedish does not use the verbs belonging to the semantic field of ÄLSKA as extensively. A strong influence of the source language could be observed in the translation, especially in terms of how frequently the verbs occurred in original compared to the number of occurrences in the translation.