On Semantic Agency

“The police officer keeps a watchful eye on the citizen.” Or perhaps “the citizen is subjected to police surveillance.” On the importance of maintaining precision as to whom semantic agency belongs.

In my work as a film subtitler, I use the translation strategy modulation very often, in all its forms and branched out subdivisions. One important factor in modulation is the fact that the process changes the semantic point of view of the source text. While that is often necessary, and usually perfectly justifiable, it does open the door to certain risks. Modulation will often manipulate the grammatical agency of a sentence, and could change the roles between the grammatical subject and grammatical object, or sometimes hide or camouflage the subject behind the veil of a passive construction. This is a lingustics problem sometimes described as who’s the doer and who’s the done-to.

The Russian sentence kalitka byla otkryta Olegom (the gate was opened by Oleg) implies that the mere fact that the gate was opened somehow ranks higher than the other fact that the deed was done by a man called Oleg. By using passive voice here, the grammatical agent is the gate, while the real, semantic agent, Oleg, is downplayed, and added at the end of the sentence.

The Russian sentence Oleg otkryl kalitku (Oleg opened the gate) puts the grammatical and semantic agent in the same place. Here, Oleg is the grammatical agent and the semantic agent, because he is logically the one who opened the gate.

Some languages use the former, passive, construction much more than other languages. Russian is by many claimed to have a proclivity for passive constructions. I will talk about possible reasons for that in a later blog post. Passive constructions are common in many languages, and in my work, I often find myself spending a long time deciding who’s the agent and who’s the patient in a sentence.

I recently translated one of those LA cop shows, where an abundance of camera angles document the daily life of American police officers in Los Angeles. Now, get this:

The passive construction the cocaine bag was tossed on the ground carries more ambiguity than the active construction the suspect tossed the cocaine bag on the ground. In the first example, we’re not sure who’s responsible for emptying the suspect’s pockets. The second sentence confirms that the suspect actively snuck out the cocaine bag from his own pocket, and tried to toss it away, which would probably be detrimental in the subsequent court process the suspect would have to go through.