"Chacun" in Portuguese and "cada qual" in French: diversification and neutralisation

Abstract

Portuguese and French language systems have many common features, but it is well-known that each language has its peculiarities. The asymmetry between the universal quantifier pronoun chacun in French and the three Portuguese pronouns cada um, cada qual and cada raises challenges of equivalence between these two Romance languages. Choosing a Portuguese equivalent of chacun presents the translator with a challenge that Koller (1992) refers to as ‘diversification’ (one-to-many relationship). Conversely, choosing a French equivalent of cada qual results in a loss of its peculiar features compared to cada um (the most frequent) and the exclusively floating quantifier cada. This ‘neutralisation’ (several-to-one relationship) can be compensated for by the translator (ibid.). Admittedly, cada qual is much rarer than cada um, but this pronoun is very intriguing for a French speaker, who wonders how professional translators in search of equivalence react when confronted to diversification of chacun and neutralisation of cada qual. The analysis of two aligned bilingual corpora consisting of FR-PT segments (translation memories) provides some answers to these questions. The first one consists of 378 segments containing chacun and its Portuguese equivalents. These segments were extracted from a journalistic corpus (MondeDiplomatique.v1, Per-Fide 2012). The second consists of 89 segments containing cadaqual and its French equivalents. These segments come from translation memories of EU institutions, also made available to the public by the Per-Fide project. Not surprisingly, cada um is the most frequent equivalent of chacunand chacun is the most frequent equivalent of cada qual. But the solutions to the challenges raised by diversification and neutralisation are varied and even go beyond the framework of universal quantification. This finding confirms the diversity of factors involved in the choices of professional translators.