New Information in a Text

One domain I study with language speakers is Discourse Analysis, which talks about various topics that relate to grammar at a level larger than a single sentence. This might be, for example, how you decide whether to use a noun or pronoun for a participant, how you distinguish paragraph breaks, or what tenses are used to move the story along.

One interesting topic in this domain is how to introduce new information in a story. French (and English) can do this in many ways. For example, there is no problem with introducing new material in an adverbial clause at the beginning of a sentence:

"After John came in, he sat down."

This sentence is totally fine, even if John's entrance was not previously mentioned (or implied).

Another possibility is in a relative clause:

"He saw a cat that ran away"

Here, too, the fact that the cat ran away could be mentioned here for the first time in the story.

For many languages in Africa, this is not natural. Both sentence-initial adverbial clauses and relative clauses are limited to information already known (previously stated or at least strongly implied).

So, what does this mean for translation? First, translators must know if new information is allowed in these contexts in their language. Second, if it is not (and it is in the original), they may need to change to form to make things more natural. This is often hard to see, since the sentence with the adverbial or relative clause is technically "grammatical", just not natural because of the type of information it conveys. Without a study of how their language works in natural texts, translators may be influenced by their knowledge of French and not notice the lack of naturalness caused by translating too directly.

Here are some examples of English translations of Bible verses. Can you think of alternate ways of saying the same thing without introducing the new information in these contexts?

(After a description of Saul's reign and no mention of its end)

After removing Saul, He made David their king.

Joseph of Arimathea, a prominent member of the Council, who was himself waiting for the kingdom of God, went boldly to Pilate and ...

Praise God who reigns in the heavens.