Direct and Indirect Speech: A Preliminary Questionnaire

This questionnaire is meant to help you as a translator (either national or expatriate) in analysing a particular area of the language you are working in, namely direct and indirect speech. It assumes you have collected a number of narrative texts which contain direct and indirect speech, and that you are working on translation. The orientation of this questionnaire is primarily linguistic and as such it could lead to an article on this topic or to a section or chapter in a monograph. However, the main motivation for this questionnaire comes from translation. If you can take time to find the answers to the questions below, it will help you considerably in producing natural style in translation. Hence I have included short notes on ‘relevance for translation’ (RFT for short) after some questions. I have divided the questionnaire into three parts. Part A deals with direct versus indirect speech, part B with the quote margin, and part C with vocatives.