Plain Pennsylvania German (PPG) is an unstandardised minority language used today mostly by  conservative religious groups like Amish and Old Order Mennonites in Northern America. The repertoire of PPG speakers is commonly labeled as diglossic, English being the high variety generally employed in more formal settings and in written communication. 

Recently, Jehovah’s Witnesses have started to translate some of their English web content into PPG (www.jw.org) drawing upon the PPG Bible version and its spelling rules (first published in: Committee for Translation 1993). Some of these target texts (TT) have been collected together with the English source texts (ST) to build the aligned ENDE translation corpus presented here (available on: www.deitsch.eu).

example (i) [360]
TT: Vass is en goodah vayk fa kamfirt gevva zu ebbah?
What is a good way for comfort give to someone?
ST: What is a particularly effective way to provide consolation?

example (ii) [446]
TT: vass fa goodah attitude hott eah katt?
what for good attitude has he had?
ST: what fine attitude did he have?

Looking at (i) and (ii), there appear to be many similarities at different levels between the TT and the ST, but if we try to trace them back to their causes we see a quite intricate picture.

• PPG and English share many structures and vocabulary because they both belong to the Germanic language group (as, e.g., in (i) PPG goodah vs. ENG good);
• from the outset in colonial times, Pennsylvania German has been in constant and intensive contact with the surrounding  English varieties, causing many English words and structures to enter the language and become part of it over time (as, e.g., (i) PPG kamfirt vs. ENG comfort); 
• finally, the translation process as a language contact practice (Malamatidou 2016) may produce so-called loan translations, which cover lexical items as well as grammatical elements (cfr. Meriläinen/Riionheimo/Kuusi/Lantto 2016, 119). Plausible loan translations are found in (i), where the PPG sentence mirrors the English interrogative construction What is  a [adjective] way to [infinitive]; in (ii) not only the English noun attitude is taken over from the ST, but also a very similar sentence construction.

Significantly, the relationship between PPG and English is not balanced since PPG has no recognised standard and little prestige. The degree of standardisation of the target language is crucial for the impact the source language may produce in translation (Kranich/Becher/Höder 2011, 37–38); for lack of PPG dictionaries and grammar books, the pioneer translators can only rely on their own PPG competence within their bilingual speaker’s repertoire (Hans-Bianchi 2023, 292–294).

In this talk, I will analyse the ENDE corpus data trying to disentangle the different layers of shared language structures and vocabulary in order to account for and substantiate the real impact of the translation process in bringing matter and patterns from the English source text into the PPG target text.

References:
Committee for Translation (1993): Es Nei Teshtament. Special Pennsylvania Dutch − English edition (Director: Hank
Hershberger). The Bible League.
Hans-Bianchi, B. (2023): Vass doon miah aekshli lanna…? Die tun+Infinitiv-Konstruktion in Pennsyl-vaniadeutsch, in:
B. Hans-Bianchi & B. Vogt (eds.): Deutsch im Kontakt. Neue empirische Studien zu Kontaktphänomenen und
-szenarien in der Gegenwart (Germanistische Linguistik 260–262), Georg Olms, 283–334.
Kranich, Svenja/Becher, Viktor/Höder, Steffen (2011): A tentative typology of translation-induced language change. In:
Kranich, Svenja/Becher, Viktor/Höder, Steffen/House, Juliane (Hrsg.): Multilingual Discourse Production.
Diachronic and Synchronic Perspectives. John Benjamins, 11–43.
Malamatidou, Sofia (2016): Understanding translation as a site of language contact. The potential of the Code-Copying
Framework as a descriptive mechanism in translation studies. In: Target 28(3), 399–423.
Meriläinen, Lea/Riionheimo, Helka/Kuusi, Päivi/Lantto, Hanna (2016): Loan translations as a language contact
phenomenon: Crossing the boundaries between contact linguistics, second language acquisition research and
translation studies. In: Philologia estonica tallinnensis 1, 104–124.