We examine the expression of agentivity in reported speech in a bidirectional
French-Finnish literary corpus. The study focuses on syntactic subject change in
translation by comparing systematically the subject of the source text with the
subject of the target text. The analysis of the subject change in translation will
allow us to show that this change goes hand in hand with a change in the degree
of agentivity of the subject between the source and the target text. Furthermore,
this change often results in an increase in subject agentivity in translation.
This contribution also shows that this increase in agentivity corresponds to the
adoption of a different point of view in the translated text compared to the original
text. Two types of subject corresponding to two distinct points of view seem to be
privileged in translation in the reported speech of the corpus studied: that of the speaker-narrator and that of the character who acts in the process described in the
reported speech.