LINKING DEVICES IN STUDENT TRANSLATIONS OF THE GERMAN FAIRY TALE FRAU HOLLE

Linking devices are, among others, language units used to achieve cohesion, a primary concept of text organisation, i.e., a semantic concept used to denote relations of meaning among text constituents that define it as a text (Halliday and Hasan, 1976: 4-6). This paper focuses on linking devices – conjunctions, subjunctions, and text connectors in the Croatian translations of the German fairy tale Frau Holle. The aim is to compare the changes that happen while translating linking devices from one language into the other and the adjustments that happen in this process. The corpus analysis shows more variation in translations regarding the semantic categories, but most align with the categories in the source text. The translations also show more variation regarding the type of linking devices (the source text contains 4 and the translation 7 categories). The corpus also shows that most linking devices in both the source and the target text are structurally simple (95.2% vs. 88.7 %) and that the number of complex linking devices is somewhat higher in the translations (10.7 % compared to 4 % in the source text).