Data to a study of syntactic markedness as a cultural transmitter in the Swedish translation of Witold Gombrowicz's novel Trans-Atlantyk

Extracted matches to corpus queries, corpus queries, scripts to query corpora for a study of syntactic markedness as a cultural transmitter in the Swedish translation of Witold Gombrowicz's novel Trans-Atlantyk Witold Gombrowicz, a world-famous Polish existentialist writer, is known for his stylistic eccentricity. Thecentral theme of his work was the discrepancy between the modern individual and the national identity. In his1953 novel Trans-Atlantyk, this tension is reflected not only in the content but also in the form of expression,which deconstructs a distinctive 17th-century Polish storytelling style – a style that for modern Poles remainsfamiliar and laden with patriotic connotations. Translating such a text poses a formidable challenge. This studyexamines the potential pitfalls of this challenge from the syntactic perspective, applying the concept of structuralmarkedness to a case study of the Swedish translation of Trans-Atlantyk – regarded as one of its most successfulrenditions in another language. A quantitative comparison of the distributions of selected syntactic structuresin the novel and in a reference corpus reveals extreme syntactic markedness in both the original Polish and theSwedish version. Our analysis shows that the Swedish translation preserves and even amplifies key features ofGombrowicz’s marked style – especially the fronting of infinitive clauses. This confirms that syntactic markednessplays a central role in the novel’s rhetoric and is effectively rendered in Bodegård’s translation.