Vajon in Translated Hungarian

This paper presents an analysis of the structures the discourse marker vajon forms in translated Hungarian fiction. Although translation data has been deployed in the study of discourse markers (Aijmer & Simon- Vandenbergen, 2004), such studies do not account for translation-specific phenomena which can influence the data of their analysis. In addition, translated discourse markers could offer insights into the idiosyncratic properties of translated texts as well as the culturally defined norms of translation that guide the creation of target texts. The analysis presented in this paper extends the cross-linguistic approach beyond contrastive analysis with a detailed investigation of two corpora of translated texts in order to identify patterns which could be a sign of translation or genre norms impacting the target texts. As a result, a distinct, diverging pattern emerges between the two corpora: patterns of explicit polarity show a marked difference. However, further research is needed to clarify whether these are due to language, genre, or translation norms.