Translating punctuation marks in German texts into Thai: A study of functional transfer of semicolon ( ; ), colon ( : ), and dash ( – ) through translations by students of German Section, Faculty of Humanities, Chiang Mai University

Abstract

This research article analyzes the translations of students majoring in German, Faculty of Humanities, Chiang Mai University when confronting colon, semicolon, and dash – punctuation marks functioning in a semantically coordinating manner – in a non-literary context of newspaper article in order to point out the functional importance of the aforementioned punctuation marks, aiming to inspire for more demand for emphasis on the orthographic topic in the field of teaching German as a foreign language. With the analysis of the collected data which are featured with translation exercises, the outcomes of the research show as following: First, it is almost imperative to substitute the punctuation marks in the source text with coordinating conjunctions and phrases in the Thai translation. Without them, the flow of meaning in the sentences is broken; Second, apart from substituting with functional equivalences, attempts to translate the punctuation marks into other functionally inequivalent conjunctions and phrases can be interpreted as the needs for connecting two sentences in Thai translations, which originally in German jointed by the punctuation marks; Third, there are also the examples avoiding to translate the punctuation marks but showing somewhat the connection between the sentences with the strategy of melting two sentences into one or borrowing the conjunction present in the post-punctuation-mark sentence. These three cases of the outcome define the potentials of learning the punctuation marks to enhance the productive and receptive competence of German learners as well as their importance in the practice of teaching German as a foreign language.