SOURCE: Malmkjaer, Kirsten. “Punctuation in Hans Christian Andersen's Stories and in their Translations into English.” In Nonverbal Communication and Translation: New Perspectives and Challenges in Literature, Interpretation and the Media, edited by Fernando Poyatos, pp. 151-62. Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1997.

In the following essay, Malmkjaer contends that the normalization of Andersen's unusual punctuation in English translations significantly alters the stories.

1. Punctuation in Translation

Punctuation marks constitute ‘a set of non-alphanumeric characters that are used to provide information about structural relations among elements of a text, including (at least in European languages) commas, semicolons, colons, periods, parentheses, quotation marks and so forth’ (Nunberg 1990:17). The primary function of this set ‘is to resolve structural ambiguities in a text, and to signal nuances of semantic significance which might otherwise not be conveyed at all, or would at best be much more difficult for a reader to figure out’ (Parkes 1992:1).

Perhaps...