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Article published In:
Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada/Spanish Journal of Applied Linguistics
Vol. 35:1 (2022) ► pp.1–29

Functionally-defined recurrent multi-word units in English-to-Polish translation

A corpus-based study

ORCID logo | University of Opole
ORCID logo | University of Birmingham
This study uses both parallel and comparable reference corpora in the English-Polish language pair to explore how translators deal with recurrent multi-word items performing specific discoursal functions. We also consider whether the observed tendencies overlap with those found in native texts, and the extent to which the discoursal functions realised by the multi-word items under scrutiny are “preserved” in translation. Capitalizing on findings from earlier research (Granger, 2014; Grabar & Lefer, 2015), we analyzed a pre-selected set of phrases signaling stance-taking and those functioning as textual, discourse-structuring devices originally found in the European Parliament proceedings corpus (Koehn, 2005) and included in the English-Polish parallel corpus Paralela (Pęzik, 2016). Since our goal was to explore whether and to what extent English functionally-defined phrases reflect the same level of formulaicity and regularity in both Polish translations and native Polish texts, the findings provided insights into the translation tendencies of such items, and revealed – using inter-rater agreement metrics – that the discoursal functions of recurrent n-grams may change in translation.
Keywords: corpus-based study, translation studies, parallel corpora, comparable corpora, metadiscursive multi-word items, translation patterns, English-to-Polish translation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Metadiscourse and corpus-based translation studies
  • 3.Methodology
    • 3.1Research material
    • 3.2Units of analysis
    • 3.3Research questions and hypotheses
    • 3.4Procedures and study stages
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Recurrent n-grams in English-to-Polish translation in the EPP sub-corpus of Paralela
    • 4.2Polish equivalents in native-Polish texts
    • 4.3Discourse functions in English-to-Polish translation of functionally-defined n-grams
  • 5.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
  • Dictionaries (accessed online)
  • Corpora
Published online: 23 December 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/resla.19037.gra
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