Is French a subordination-oriented language? Some Observations Based on French Translations of Bulgarian Literary Texts

By adopting a contrastive approach, I aim at studying subordination in French as a construction tendency of this language - together with a hierarchical organization - in opposition with the coordination tendencies of the Bulgarian language and its adverbial layout. My analysis is based on a corpus of Bulgarian literary texts and their translations into French. The observation of the examples shows that the French sentence's hierarchical organization influences in a serious way the translators' decisions: they choose to dismiss some possible translations (use of the paratactic layout, for instance) because of a hypothetical non-acceptance of these translations by the target language system due to its syntactic organization. I not only criticise from a traductological point of view the rightfulness of these changes motivated by a search of idiomatic expressions, but I use as well the analysis of the translations in order to bring out the predilection of the French language for subordination.