Finding the (un)expected? Quantitative and qualitative comparisons of term variants and their translations in a parallel corpus of EU texts

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingChapterpeer-review

Abstract

The use of digitalised text corpora in combination with corpus processing tools have significantly advanced descriptive research methods in translation studies. Corpora allow us to study the textual and linguistic features of translations, taking into account different contextual parameters that have an impact on translation choices and, ultimately, the translation product. In the context of translation, studying corpora was initially a method carried out by the translation scholar in order to confirm or reject certain theoretical claims about translations (Toury 1995; Halverson 1998; Laviosa 1998a; Laviosa 1998b). More recently, corpora have gradually found their way in the translation classroom (Zanettin, Bernardini & Stewart 2003; Bernardini 2006; Beeby, Inés & Sánchez-Gijón 2009; Vaezian 2009) and have become an integral part of the translation workflow in certain professional contexts (Bowker & Pearson 2002; Bernardini 2006; Gallego-Hernández 2015). Corpora are now increasingly used by professional translators for different (very often pragmatic) reasons: e.g. studying the meaning, connotation, collocational behaviour,... of a word in the source text or, finding its translation equivalents in a corpus of target texts. The rationale for using parallel corpora (i.e. a collection of source texts and their translations) to find translation equivalents can obviously vary among translators. In certain cases, translators already have a translation equivalent in mind but still tend to consult a corpus to find confirmation for their 'translation hypothesis'. Such translators are looking for 'expected' patterns of equivalence but may sometimes – in their search for specific patterns – also encounter 'unexpected' translations. In other cases, translators may have little clue of how a pattern (word, term, expression) in the source text can be rendered in the target text and hope to find a proper (possibly unexpected) solution in the corpus. In this chapter, we will show how a corpus-based approach was applied to quantitative and qualitative comparisons of term variants and their translations in EU parallel texts in order to search for (un)expected patterns in the treatment of term variation in EU translations.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationCorpus-based Approaches to Translation and Interpreting: from theory to applications
EditorsMiriam Seghiri, Gloria Corpas Pastor
PublisherPeter Lang 
Pages43-63
Number of pages21
ISBN (Electronic)9783653060553
ISBN (Print)9783631609569
Publication statusPublished - 2016

Publication series

NameStudien zur romanischen Sprachwissenschaft und interkulturellen Kommunikation
PublisherPeter Lang
Volume106
ISSN (Print)1436-1914

Keywords

  • terminology
  • corpus linguistics
  • translation

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