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Straddling the divide between contrastive and translation studies
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Aims and Scope The intuition that translations are somehow different from texts that are not translations has been around for many years, but most of the common linguistic frameworks are not comprehensive enough to account for the wealth and complexity of linguistic phenomena that make a translation a special kind of text. The present book provides a novel methodology for investigating the specific linguistic properties of translations. As this methodology is both corpus-based and driven by a functional theory of language, it is powerful enough to account for the multi-dimensional nature of cross-linguistic variation in translations and cross-lingually comparable texts. © 2003 by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co. KG, D-10785 Berlin. All rights reserved.
This paper introduces the Spoken British National Corpus 2014, an 11.5-million-word corpus of orthographically transcribed conversations among L1 speakers of British English from across the UK, recorded in the years 2012-2016. After showing that a survey of the recent history of corpora of spoken British English justifies the compilation of this new corpus, we describe the main stages of the Spoken BNC2014's creation: design, data and metadata collection, transcription, XML encoding, and annotation. In doing so we aim to (i) encourage users of the corpus to approach the data with sensitivity to the many methodological issues we identified and attempted to overcome while compiling the Spoken BNC2014, and (ii) inform (future) compilers of spoken corpora of the innovations we implemented to attempt to make the construction of corpora representing spontaneous speech in informal contexts more tractable, both logistically and practically, than in the past.
The profession of translation is undergoing enormous change, expedited by the global recession that began in 2007-2008. Government policies and an intensive focus on cost has resulted in a large scale move to freelance or contingent work, leaving the worker in a precarious position with regard to rights and undermining his or her agency. This shift is exemplified particularly by the vendor model widespread in specialised translation work. Related to the downward pressure on costs and productivity is the technologisation of translation, with translation tools becoming a necessity and new use cases being found for post-edited and raw machine translation.
Despite the recession, continued growth has been reported for the language industry, and the outlook for employment in translation is positive. This paper looks at the background to the economic and technological changes to translation, attempts to put them into a wider context, and looks to the options available to translators to maximise their agency within the ‘global value chain’. Translators have little option but to embrace new competences, but also need to focus on their expertise to maximise leverage and agency.
In this introductory chapter, Granger traces the development of Contrastive Linguistics and Translation Studies over the last decades to the present day, focusing on the role of the computer corpus in giving new impetus to each field and bringing them closer together. She discusses the different types of monolingual and multilingual corpora being used in CL and TS research, proposing at the same time a common corpus terminology. She then relates the contribution of the different corpus types to the major research interests of each discipline, highlighting the complementarity of the research and calling for increased cross-fertilization and resource-pooling. She then examines the practical issues of corpus exploitation, with a review of corpus analysis tools of particular value for CL and TS and finally, the contribution of corpus-based CL and TS research in the teaching of foreign languages and translation. 0. Contrastive Linguistics and Translation Studies, two converging disciplines Although the disciplines of Contrastive Linguistics (CL) and Translation Studies (TS) cover partly common ground, it is only recently, with the emergence of corpora, that they have started to converge. This rapprochement is apparent from recent publications 1 and conferences that have brought together specialists from the two fields, bearing witness to the vitality of multilingual studies in general. The history of Contrastive Linguistics has been characterized by a pattern of success-decline-success. CL was originally a purely applied enterprise, aiming to produce more efficient foreign language teaching methods and tools. Based on the general assumption that difference equals difficulty, CL, which in those days was called Contrastive Analysis (CA), consisted in charting areas of similarity and difference between languages and basing the teaching syllabus on the contrastive findings. Advances in the understanding of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) mechanisms led to a questioning of the very basis of CA. Interlingual factors were found to be less prevalent than other factors, among which intralingual mechanisms such as the overgeneralization of target rules and external factors such as the influence of teaching methods or personal factors like motivation. This led to the decline of CA, but not to its death. At first, it gave rise to some drastic pedagogical decisions, which in some cases culminated in a total ban of the mother tongue in FL teaching. But research (see Odlin 1989, Selinker 1992, James 1998) re-established transfer as a major - if not the major - factor in SLA, which in turn led to a progressive - albeit limited - return of contrastive
This paper introduces InterCorp, a parallel corpus including texts in Czech and 27 other languages, available for online searches via a web interface. After discussing some issues and merits of a multilingual resource we argue that it has an important role especially for languages with fewer native speakers, supporting both comparative research and studies of the language from the perspective of other languages. We proceed with an overview of the corpus — the strategy and criteria for including new texts, the representation of available languages and text types, linguistic annotation, and a sketch of pre-processing issues. Finally, we present the search interface and suggest some research opportunities.
What is the explanation for vigorous variation between was and were in plural existential constructions, and what is the optimal tool for analyzing it? Previous studies of this phenomenon have used the variable rule program, a generalized linear model; however, recent developments in statistics have introduced new tools, including mixed-effects models, random forests, and conditional inference trees that may open additional possibilities for data exploration, analysis, and interpretation. In a step-by-step demonstration, we show how this well-known variable benefits from these complementary techniques. Mixed-effects models provide a principled way of assessing the importance of random-effect factors such as the individuals in the sample. Random forests provide information about the importance of predictors, whether factorial or continuous, and do so also for unbalanced designs with high multicollinearity, cases for which the family of linear models is less appropriate. Conditional inference trees straightforwardly visualize how multiple predictors operate in tandem. Taken together, the results confirm that polarity, distance from verb to plural element, and the nature of the DP are significant predictors. Ongoing linguistic change and social reallocation via morphologization are operational. Furthermore, the results make predictions that can be tested in future research. We conclude that variationist research can be substantially enriched by an expanded tool kit.
This article outlines the beginnings of corpus-based contrastive studies with special reference to the development of parallel corpora that took place in Scandinavia in the early 1990s under the direction of Stig Johansson. It then discusses multilingual corpus types and methodological issues of their exploration, including the tertium comparationis for contrastive studies based on different types of corpora. Some glimpses are offered of recent developments and current trends in the field, including the widening scope of corpus-based contrastive analysis, concerning language pairs as well as the kinds of topics studied and the methods used. The paper ends by identifying and discussing some challenges for the field and indicating prospects and directions for its future.
In its core sense, contrastive linguistics can be defined as the theoretically grounded, systematic and synchronic comparison of usually two languages, or at most no more than a small number of languages. In the early stages of the development of the field, comparisons were usually carried out with a view to applying the findings for the benefit of the community, for example in foreign-language teaching or in translation. In recent years, this applied orientation has persisted, but it has been complemented by a growing body of contrastive research with a more theoretical orientation. The languages compared can be genetically related or unrelated, as well as typologically similar or dissimilar. Some comparisons, in particular those with a more theoretical orientation, are symmetrical in the sense that they cover the specifics of one language viewed against another in a balanced way. Applied contrastive comparisons of languages, on the other hand, are often asymmetrical or “directed.” This is typically the case in pedagogically oriented contrastive research, where the focus is on differences in L2, which are seen as potential sources of difficulty in foreign-language learning. Contrastive linguistics emerged as a major subfield of applied linguistics in the 1940s and consolidated quickly throughout the 1950s and 1960s. When it became clear that contrastive linguistics was not going to provide the foundation for a comprehensive theory of foreign-language learning, the field started showing signs of strain. Over time, however, it has avoided disintegration and managed to reposition itself successfully—not as a clearly demarcated subfield, but rather as an approach that has continued to prove its usefulness to a wide range of applied- and theoretical-linguistic domains, such as second-language acquisition (SLA) research, translation studies and translation theory, lexicography, the study of cross-cultural communication, and even cultural studies. Progress in contrastive linguistics has manifested itself on the conceptual level, for example through the constant refinement of notions such as L1 transfer and interference, or through fruitful interdisciplinary dialogue with language typology, but also in contrastivists’ active contribution to the construction of digital research tools such as learner corpora and translation corpora. The following annotated bibliography charts the development of the field on the basis of publications that stand out either because they have become classic points of reference for other work or because they have raised important theoretical and methodological points. Studies of specific phenomena in individual language pairs are mentioned for illustrative purposes. No comprehensive coverage of such largely descriptive work is attempted, however.
Although journalistic translation research has been quite successful over the past 15 years, from a methodological point of view many scholars struggle with the total or partial absence of a traceable source text. As a consequence, parallel corpora are rare and the researcher often has to rely on multilingual sets of texts that are comparable. This contribution deals in detail with that essential methodological problem. It relates the multi-source and multi-author situation of translation in journalism to this non- (or only partially) identifiable character of the source text–target text relationship. We argue that the triangulation of comparative text analysis with fieldwork adds value to this type of research. This argument is illustrated with a study triangulating textual analysis in three languages with interviews and non-participant observation. Such a triangulation also responds to earlier calls for a more elaborated contextualization of the production process and the socio-historical circumstances in journalistic translation research.
The gravitational pull hypothesis was introduced as a possible explanation for some general features of translated language (Halverson 2003, 2010a), building on the cognitive semantic concept of semasiological salience in linguistic categories. The basic idea is that highly salient linguistic items (lexis or grammatical constructions) would be more likely to be chosen by translators and thus be overrepresented in translational corpus data. The hypothesis is being developed into a more comprehensive and detailed cognitive linguistic model to incorporate salience phenomena in both source and target language categories as well as the effects of entrenched links between translation pairs. This chapter presents preliminary investigations of central elements of the model using the polysemous verb get as a test case. Following a presentation of the revised model, the first stage of the analysis involves using independent empirical studies of get (Berez and Gries 2008; Johansson and Oksefjell 1996; Gronemeyer 1999) and of get and its Norwegian counterparts (Ebeling 2003) to establish a viable model of a bilingual (Norwegian-English) schematic network for this verb. In order to test this model in an online non-translation task, an elicitation test is run on Norwegian-English bilinguals. This provides further evidence of the salience structure within the target language category in these bilinguals. In the second stage, corpus data from the English-Norwegian parallel corpus and Translog performance data are analyzed to look for evidence of the hypothesized effects. The empirical results are discussed both in terms of the evolving cognitive model and in terms of the contribution of various data types to testing cognitive theoretic notions.
This chapter investigates the influence of the source and target language on translations in a selection of 150 pairs of source and target texts from a bidirectional parallel corpus of English and German texts, applying a combination of multivariate analysis, visualization and minimally supervised machine learning. Based on a procedure developed by Diwersy, Evert and Neumann (2014), it investigates the way in which translations differ from comparable original texts depending on the translation direction and other factors. The multivariate approach enables us to detect patterns of feature combinations that cannot be observed in conventional frequency-based analyses, providing new evidence for the validity of interference or shining through in translation. We report a clear shining through effect that is more pronounced for translations from English into German than for the opposite translation direction, pointing towards a prestige effect in this language pair.
The book specifies a corpus architecture, including annotation and querying techniques, and its implementation. The corpus architecture is developed for empirical studies of translations, and beyond those for the study of texts which are inter-lingually comparable, particularly texts of similar registers. The compiled corpus, CroCo, is a resource for research and is, with some copyright restrictions, accessible to other research projects. Most of the research was undertaken as part of a DFG-Project into linguistic properties of translations. Fundamentally, this research project was a corpus-based investigation into the language pair English-German. The long-term goal is a contribution to the study of translation as a contact variety, and beyond this to language comparison and language contact more generally with the language pair English - German as our object languages. This goal implies a thorough interest in possible specific properties of translations, and beyond this in an empirical translation theory. The methodology developed is not restricted to the traditional exclusively system-based comparison of earlier days, where real-text excerpts or constructed examples are used as mere illustrations of assumptions and claims, but instead implements an empirical research strategy involving structured data (the sub-corpora and their relationships to each other, annotated and aligned on various theoretically motivated levels of representation), the formation of hypotheses and their operationalizations, statistics on the data, critical examinations of their significance, and interpretation against the background of system-based comparisons and other independent sources of explanation for the phenomena observed. Further applications of the resource developed in computational linguistics are outlined and evaluated. © 2012 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston. All right reserved.
The book provides the first comparison of usage preferences across registers in the language pair English-German. Due to the innovative quantitative approach and broad coverage, the volume is an excellent resource for scholars working in contrastive linguistics and translation studies as well as for corpus linguists.
Much research in translation studies indicates that translated texts are ontologically different from original non-translated ones. Translated texts, in any language, can be considered a dialect of that language, known as ‘translationese’. Several characteristics of translationese have been proposed as universal in a series of hypotheses. In this work, we test these hypotheses using a computational methodology that is based on supervised machine learning. We define several classifiers that implement various linguistically informed features, and assess the degree to which different sets of features can distinguish between translated and original texts. We demonstrate that some feature sets are indeed good indicators of translationese, thereby corroborating some hypotheses, whereas others perform much worse (sometimes at chance level), indicating that some ‘universal’ assumptions have to be reconsidered.
In memoriam: Miriam Shlesinger, 1947–2012
On the basis of synchronic English language material, Bolinger (Degree Words, Mouton, 1972) has put forward the hypothesis that intensifying meanings or “degree words” often develop from identifying expressions. This paper will empirically test Bolinger's hypothesis by means of in-depth diachronic study of the development of such—one of Bolinger's central examples—and of its Dutch cognate zulk in historical text corpora. To this aim, a detailed cognitive-functional account will first be provided of the (differences between the) identifying and intensifying uses of such and zulk, with attention for diachronic changes affecting the syntax and semantics of these uses, cross-linguistically as well as language-specifically. It will be shown that, as predicted by Bolinger (Degree Words, Mouton, 1972), the proportion of identifying uses decreases over time in favor of the intensifying uses both in English and Dutch. The comparison between such and zulk will, however, show that, despite the close relation between these two languages, the development does not run strictly parallel in English and Dutch, thus endorsing a view that language change does not necessarily follow predetermined pathways. We will argue that minute differences in the syntax of such and zulk steer the diachronic course these elements follow. Finally, Bolinger's shift from identification to intensification will be discussed in terms of its relation to existing (inter)subjectification hypotheses.
This paper presents the Dutch Parallel Corpus, a high-quality parallel corpus for Dutch, French and English consisting of more than ten million words. The corpus contains five different text types and is balanced with respect to text type and translation direction. All texts included in the corpus have been cleared from copyright. We discuss the importance of parallel corpora in various research domains and contrast the Dutch Parallel Corpus with existing parallel corpora. The Dutch Parallel Corpus distinguishes itself from other parallel corpora by having a balanced composition and by its availability to the wide research community, thanks to its copyright clearance. All texts in the corpus are sentence-aligned and further enriched with basic linguistic annotations (lemmas and word class information). Approximately 25,000 words of the Dutch-English part have been manually aligned at the sub-sentential level. Rich metadata facilitates the navigability of the corpus and enables users to select the texts that satisfy their needs. The entire corpus is released as full texts in XML format and is also available via a web interface, which supports basic and complex search queries and presents the results as parallel concordances. The corpus will be distributed by the Flemish-Dutch Human Language Technology Agency (TST-Centrale).
Plan de l'article1. Introduction2. Parallel Corpora in Translation Studies2.1. Parallel Corpus Projects 3. Corpus Design, Copyright Clearance and Metadata4. Alignment and Linguistic Annotation4.1. Sentence Alignment4.2. Sub-sentential Alignment4.3. Linguistic Annotation5. Corpus Exploitation6. Conclusion
Against the background of current corpus-based research on the features of translated language, this study investigates two research questions that emerge as "gaps" in existing research: (1) What are the occurrence patterns for the different hypothesised features of translated language, investigated together? (2) What is the relationship between register and the features of translated language? Utilising a comparable corpus of translated and original English produced in South Africa, the study tests two hypotheses based on the above questions. The first hypothesis is that the occurrence of linguistic realisations associated with particular features of translated language will demonstrate significant differences in a corpus of translated English texts and a comparable corpus of non-translated English texts, reflecting overall more explicit, more conservative, and simplified language use in the translation corpus than in the corpus of original writing. As a starting point for factoring in the variable of register, it was further hypothesised that the frequency of these features in the translation corpus will show no significant effect for the relationship between corpus and register-in other words, the translation-related features would not be strongly linked to register variation. This has the collateral effect of suggesting a broader hypothesis that in the translation corpus less register variation, or sensitivity to register, will occur, specifically as a consequence of translation-specific effects. The findings from the investigation provide limited support for the first hypothesis, with statistically significant differences between the two corpora for only two of the features investigated: the use of the optional that complementiser, and lexical variety. The second hypothesis, that the interference of the translation process will lead to a "levelling out" of registers, is not supported by the findings.
This edition has been replaced by a new edition and is no longer available for purchase.
A replacement of the author's well-known book on Translation Theory, In Search of a Theory of Translation (1980), this book makes a case for Descriptive Translation Studies as a scholarly activity as well as a branch of the discipline, having immediate consequences for issues of both a theoretical and applied nature. Methodological discussions are complemented by an assortment of case studies of various scopes and levels, with emphasis on the need to contextualize whatever one sets out to focus on. Part One deals with the position of descriptive studies within TS and justifies the author's choice to devote a whole book to the subject. Part Two gives a detailed rationale for descriptive studies in translation and serves as a framework for the case studies comprising Part Three. Concrete descriptive issues are here tackled within ever growing contexts of a higher level: texts and modes of translational behaviour — in the appropriate cultural setup; textual components — in texts, and through these texts, in cultural constellations. Part Four asks the question: What is knowledge accumulated through descriptive studies performed within one and the same framework likely to yield in terms of theory and practice?
This article presents a method for the establishment and description of shifts in integral translations of narrative texts. The method is based on the premise that both micro- and macrostructural shifts in translation can furnish indications of the translational norms adopted by the translator, his interpretation of the original text and the strategy applied during the process of translation. Further it is based on the assumption that research on the nature and frequency of microstructural shifts must precede research on macrostructural ones, in order to guarantee that findings are verifiable and the study repeatable. Thus, the method developed consists of two components: A comparative and a descriptive model. The comparative model is designed for the classification of microstructural shifts, i.e. semantic, stylistic and pragmatic shifts within sentences, clauses and phrases. The descriptive model focuses on the effects of microstructural shifts on the macrostructural level. With the aid of this model shifts with respect to characters, events, time, place and other meaningful components of the text can be determined and described.
Revisiting Certain Concepts of Translation Studies through the Study of Media Practices
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