Reporting verbs in narrative fiction are more than syntactic necessities; they function stylistically to convey tone, emotion, characterisation, and narrative pace. This study compares the use and translation of reporting verbs in two detective novels from different literary periods: Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Sign of Four, published in 1890, and Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code, published in 2003, along with their respective Indonesian translations published in the 21st century. Using AntConc and AntPConc, a parallel corpus application, this study analyses the taxonomy, frequency, translation shifts, and syntactic behaviour of reporting verbs in both source texts and their Indonesian translations. The findings reveal that neutral structuring reporting verbs dominate both source texts; the Indonesian translations tend to further neutralise reporting verbs, particularly in the translation of Doyle’s novel.  As a result, descriptive reporting verbs and stylistically marked verbs tend to decrease in both translation texts, reducing affective and interpersonal nuances embedded in characterisation. The study also finds that Brown employs more descriptive and metapropositional verbs than Doyle, reflecting the faster pace and stronger interpersonal tension of modern thriller fiction.  Additionally, the unique pattern of 19th-century “reporting verb + subject pronoun” is modernised to "subject pronoun + verb". These findings highlight that the translation of reporting verbs is not a neutral linguistic process but a form of stylistic mediation. The study contributes to corpus-based translation studies by demonstrating how diachronic stylistic features and characterisation are negotiated, normalised, and reconstructed in literary translation to mediate readability and narrative convention.

Keywords: reporting verbs; translation studies; diachronic comparison; parallel corpus; characterisation; detective novels  

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