Translations are invaluable sources for contrastive research. Yet they possess specific linguistic features, which arise from the nature of translation as a form of language contact. This paper explores some aspects of the specificity of translated texts: social and cognitive determinants of translations are briefly discussed, and the linguistic consequences are evaluated in view of recent findings of corpus research based on translational corpora, parallel as well as monolingual comparable corpora. It is argued that we cannot hope to ‘purify’ translational data so as to have them reflect two fully independent languages, unless we sacrifice the use of naturally-occurring data. Translational corpora are biased for genre, because translation situations are asymmetrical, and they are biased for equivalence, because the situation necessitates a search for equivalence more than might be natural in spontaneous production. However, translation and other language contact are ubiquitous in our globalized world; thus entirely independent, ‘pure’ languages are more illusory than real, thus hardly worth hankering after.
2023. Lexical borrowing in journalism in a time of political crisis. Perspectives 31:3 ► pp. 562 ff.
Jiang, Xinlei & Yue Jiang
2022. Menzerath-Altmann Law in Consecutive and Simultaneous Interpreting: Insights into Varied Cognitive Processes and Load. Journal of Quantitative Linguistics 29:4 ► pp. 541 ff.
Jiang, Yue & Ruimin Ma
2022. Does Menzerath–Altmann Law Hold True for Translational Language: Evidence from Translated English Literary Texts. Journal of Quantitative Linguistics 29:1 ► pp. 37 ff.
Lim, Lily
2021. A Corpus-Based Examination of the Translation of the Suffix –ism into Chinese. In New Perspectives on Corpus Translation Studies [New Frontiers in Translation Studies, ], ► pp. 29 ff.
Lefer, Marie-Aude
2020. Parallel Corpora. In A Practical Handbook of Corpus Linguistics, ► pp. 257 ff.
2016. Coding Betweenness in Swedish and Norwegian Translations from English. Meta 60:3 ► pp. 576 ff.
Pavesi, Maria
2014. This and That in the Language of Film Dubbing: A Corpus-Based Analysis. Meta 58:1 ► pp. 103 ff.
Marco, Josep
2010. Normalisation and the Translation of Phraseology in the COVALT Corpus1. Meta 54:4 ► pp. 842 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 5 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
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