Author:Gemanen Gyuse
Date: 05/07/2026
The systematic differences between English and French morphosyntax and lexis can create problems during translation and ultimately affect the translation quality, especially when translators always assume a one-to-one mapping between the two linguistic systems. This paper examines how English–French morphosyntactic and lexical variability influences translation quality. Drawing on contrastive analysis, it treats translation as a process of re-encoding meaning across distinct systems that organise grammar and vocabulary differently. The analysis compares parallel divergences in agreement, word order, verb morphology, and collocation, and assesses how these divergences affect accuracy, fluency, and idiomaticity in the target text. Findings demonstrate that literal transfer often produces acceptable results for simple structures, but leads to awkward or unnatural phrasing where language-specific constraints operate. The study thus links empirical observations primarily from a corpus of six English–French translation manuals to theoretical concepts of equivalence and non-equivalence, offering practical criteria for managing variability while situating the results within current debates in Translation Studies (TS). Findings in this study can significantly contribute to translation theory by demonstrating that systematic interlingual variability constitutes a core determinant of translation difficulty, problem, and quality.
Keywords: English–French translation, morphosyntactic variability, lexical variability, systemic choices, contrastive analysis.
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