Interference Patterns of the Verb Say in the Narration of English-Polish Literary Translations: A Corpus-Based Study

In this paper I present a corpus-based study of the interference of the verb say from English source texts into their Polish translations. I compare a sizeable corpus of native Polish fic- tion with corpora of English-Polish fiction translations and argue that the various forms of the verb say commonly used in the English narration influence the choices made in some (albeit not all) of the Polish translations. In order to exemplify my claims I use parallel corpora to show how two different professional translators working with an identical set of source texts were influenced by the narrative verb distribution.