Syntactic features of translation

This article provides an overview of syntactic patterns in translated texts. Although translators have the same syntactic means at their disposal as any other writer, research has shown that the frequency with which these means are used tends to differ significantly in comparison to so-called non-mediated writing. More specifically, there is a tendency for translated texts to be syntactically simpler, more explicit, and more closely aligned with source-text syntactic structures. Whereas early research in TS mainly focused on unidimensional frequency analyses of syntactic simplification and explicitation in translated texts compared with original, non-mediated texts, analyses from the 2010s onwards have become methodologically more sophisticated, multidimensional, theoretically diverse and interdisciplinary, leading to more accurate insights of syntactic patterns in translated texts and their underlying sociocognitive mechanisms.