[New publication] Kaibao Hu and Xiaoqian Li (2019) Corpus-based Critical Translation Studies: Research Areas and Approaches. Meta: 63 (3)

Abstract: Despite growing interest in the study of translation in Thailand, relatively little has been published on contemporary Thai translation practices. This study presents a first attempt to explore legal translation into Thai, using both a purpose-built parallel corpus of international treaties translated from English into Thai, and a monolingual corpus of non-translated Thai legislation. Drawing on previous corpus-based studies concerned with general features of translation, we ask whether there is evidence of explicitation (Becher 2010a) in our translated data and whether “unique items” (Tirkkonen-Condit 2002) are underrepresented. We pursue these questions through a study of the translation of the passive voice into Thai, and focus in particular on the Thai passive markers ถูก /thùuk/, โดน /doon/, and ได้รับ /dai-rup/, which we consider unique items in Thai. The study finds that, despite some writers’ antipathy to the passive voice in Thai, most English passives are translated into Thai using the passive voice, and that in those instances where the active voice is used in the translation, there is rarely any explicitation involved, as explicit agents are rarely added in Thai. We do not find any evidence to support the hypothesis that unique items are underrepresented in translation. On the contrary, the unique items studied appear to be overrepresented in translation into Thai.

Abstract: In line with recent studies about register and source language effects on translated language (Delaere, De Sutter, et al. 2012; De Sutter, Delaere, et al. 2012; Kruger and Van Rooy 2012; Delaere and De Sutter 2017), the aim of this paper is twofold: to further investigate the influence of register and source language, and to study any potential influence of the variable “cognateness” on translated language. We focus on specific onomasiological choices (lexical choices) in the semantic field of inchoativity, made by translators into Dutch and attested in corpus observations (Dutch translated texts in the Dutch Parallel Corpus). First, we performed a multinomial regression analysis on our dataset and carried out an Analysis of Deviance to determine whether the predictor variables “source language lexeme” and “register” (“text type”) have a significant influence on the response variable (the set of lexemes representing the onomasiological choice range in translated Dutch inchoativity). Doing a second multinomial regression analysis, followed by an Analysis of Deviance, we investigate the influence of the new variable “cognateness” on the translator’s onomasiological choice (in the target language). Classification trees were generated as statistics-based visualizations of onomasiological choice in translated Dutch (translated from French and translated from English) within the semantic field of inchoativity. The results of the statistical analyses show that register, source language, and cognateness significantly influence the specific lexical choices made by translators. In addition, the visualizations show how the onomasiological choice for some target lexemes can be predicted on the basis of a single source language lexeme, while other choices are more complex, and will also be determined by the register of the text.

Abstract: Since Shlesinger’s (1998) programmatic article, many interpreting corpora have been developed. Generally, they include interpreted communication instances taking place in various settings, such as conferences, healthcare, and other institutional contexts, such as television. Notwithstanding differences concerning setting and communicative situation, all these corpora show common traits as far as size and interrogation aspects are concerned: more specifically, they have limited size, and their interrogation possibilities are influenced by the presence – or absence – of transcript-audio alignment and tagging level. This paper focuses on these aspects by presenting two corpora collected at the University of Trieste, namely CorIT (Italian Television Interpreting Corpus) and CorILex (Legal Interpreting Corpus). The main differences distinguishing these two corpora will be discussed in relation to the latest developments of research in corpus linguistics. Our goal is to identify the place interpreting corpora currently occupy within corpus linguistics, a domain that is becoming increasingly diverse, multifaceted, and multidisciplinary.

Abstract: In the field of dialogue interpreting (DI), both the use and usefulness of corpora is controversial. While on the one hand, DI research is increasingly orienting to the study of naturally-occurring interaction with a consequent increase in recorded and transcribed materials which might well be explored as corpora, on the other, DI interest in “interaction” rather than “text” has made the traditional methods of corpus linguistics less attractive for DI studies. In this paper, we report on our experience with a rather large DI collection of data (the AIM corpus), which we are implementing for corpus use. In particular, we have experimented the EXMARaLDA and ELAN software on a sub-set of 65 encounters whose transcripts are aligned with audio. So far, our experiments have taken two directions: (a) exploring potentially interesting lexical items for the analysis of structures of interaction; (b) extracting audio-aligned segments for use in e.g. specific training or learning activities. The paper thereby aims to show the use and utility of a DI corpus in the healthcare environment.

Abstract: In Dutch and German subordinate clauses, the verb is generally placed after the clausal constituents (Subject-Object-Verb structure) thereby creating a middle field (or verbal brace). This makes interpreting from SOV into SVO languages particularly challenging as it requires further processing and feats of memory. It often requires interpreters to use specific strategies (for example, anticipation) (Lederer 1981; Liontou 2011). However, few studies have tackled this issue from the point of view of interpreting into SOV languages. Producing SOV structures requires some specific cognitive effort as, for instance, subject properties need to be kept in mind in order to ensure the correct subject-verb agreement across a span of 10 or 20 words. Speakers therefore often opt for a strategy called extraposition, placing specific elements after the verb in order to shorten the brace (Hawkins 1994; Bevilacqua 2009). Dutch speakers use this strategy more often than German speakers (Haeseryn 1990). Given the additional cognitive load generated by the interpreting process (Gile 1999), it may be assumed that interpreters will shorten the verbal brace to a larger extent than native speakers.

The present study is based on a corpus of interpreted and non-mediated speeches at the European Parliament and compares middle field lengths as well as extraposition in Dutch and German subordinate clauses. Results from 3460 subordinate clauses confirm that interpreters of both languages shorten the middle field more than native speakers. The study also shows that German interpreters use extraposition more often than native speakers, but this is not the case for Dutch interpreters. Dutch and German interpreters appear to use extraposition partly because they imitate the clause word order of the source speech, showing that, in this case, extraposition can be considered an effort-saving tool.

Abstract: During the past decade, the financial and economic crisis has been one of the most discussed subjects, and, consequently, its impact in every level. This research focuses on the most relevant terms of this crisis, and particularly on the terms related to the Greek financial crisis. The starting point of our research is a glossary consisting of 800 entries, with their equivalents in various languages. Our objective is to verify the occurrences in corpora of these terms in three languages (French, English, Greek), to study their frequencies and to describe their behavior in context. Corpora allow the validation of terms that are not yet established, standardized or included in terminological databases and reference resources; moreover, we can extract and list the variations of equivalent terms. Our approach aims to complete and enrich the existing glossary, and to offer a useful tool for both translators and technical writers.

Abstract: In this paper, we examine how methods for evaluating corpora in terms of technical terms can be used for characterising technical documents used as textual materials in translation training in a translation education setup. Technical documents are one of the standard types of textual materials used in translation training courses, and choosing suitable materials for learners is an important issue. In technical documents, technical terms play an essential role. Assessing how terms are used in these documents, therefore, would help translation teachers to choose relevant documents as training materials. As corpus-characterisation methods, we used self-referring measurement of the occurrence of terminology and measurement of the characteristic semantic scale of terms. To examine the practical applicability of these methods to assessing technical documents, we prepared a total of 12 short English texts from the six domains of law, medicine, politics, physics, technology and philosophy (two texts were chosen from each domain), whose lengths ranged from 300 to 1,150 words. We manually extracted terms from each text, and using those terms, we evaluated the nature and status of the textual materials. The analysis shows that even for short texts, the corpus-characterisation methods we provide useful insights into assessing textual materials.

Abstract: In this article we provide a linguistic analysis of a corpus of machine-translated texts from English into French, in comparison with a corpus of original French. Two machine translation tools have been selected: one of them is a generic, general public, neural system while the other is a specific, statistical-based tool developed by a major international organization. Following the corpus-based translation studies approach, we provide a quantitative analysis of a series of linguistic features (lexical and grammatical) which are known to be problematic for English-French translators. We aim to show that linguistic usage, which goes beyond grammatical correctness and needs to be taken into account to provide natural, idiomatic translations in order to meet the demands of today’s translation market, is not taken into account by current machine translation systems. Our aim is to show human translators’ added value over such systems, in particular for translation trainees.