Article published In:
TargetVol. 24:2 (2012) ► pp.203–224
Is translated language more standardized than non-translated language?
Using profile-based correspondence analysis for measuring linguistic distances between language varieties.
With this article, we seek to support the law of growing standardization by showing that texts translated into Belgian Dutch make more use of standard language than non-translated Belgian Dutch texts. Additionally, we want to examine whether the use of standard vs. non-standard language can be attributed to the variables text type and source language. In order to achieve that goal, we gathered a diverse set of linguistic variables and used a 10-million-word corpus that is parallel, comparable and bidirectional (the Dutch Parallel Corpus; Macken et al. 2011). The frequency counts for each of the variables are used to determine the differences in standard language use by means of profile-based correspondence analysis (Plevoets 2008). The results of our analysis show that (i) in general, there is indeed a standardizing trend among translations and (ii) text types with a lot of editorial control (fiction, non-fiction and journalistic texts) contain more standard language than the less edited text types (administrative texts and external communication) which adds support for the idea that the differences between translated and non-translated texts are text type dependent.
Keywords: profile-based correspondence analysis, translated versus nontranslated language, standardization, Belgian Dutch, text type
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Theoretical background
- 2.1The law of growing standardization
- 2.2The language situation of Belgian Dutch
- 3.Methodology
- 3.1Hypothesis and variables selection
- 3.2Corpus and data extraction
- 3.3Manual validation
- 3.4Profile-based correspondence analysis
- 3.5Two-dimensional plots and interpretation
- 4.Results
- 5.Conclusions and suggestions for future work
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
References
References (36)
Baker, Mona. 1993. “Corpus Linguistics and Translation Studies. Implications and Applications.” In Text and Technology. In Honour of John Sinclair, ed. by Mona Baker, Gill Francis, and Elena Tognini-Bonelli, 233–250. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. 
. 1996. “Corpus-Based Translation Studies: The Challenges that Lie Ahead.” In Terminology, LSP and Translation: Studies in Language Engineering in Honour of Juan C. Sager, ed. by Harold Somers, 175–186. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Ben-Shahar, Rina. 1994. “Translating Literary Dialogue: A Problem and its Implications for Translation into Hebrew.” Target 6 (2): 195–212.
Bernardini, Silvia, and Adriano Ferraresi. 2011. “Practice, Description and Theory Come Together: Normalization or Interference in Italian Technical Translation?” Meta 56 (2): 226–246.
Bush, Peter. 2001. “Literary Translation — Practices.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies, ed. by Mona Baker, 127–130. London and New York: Routledge.
Chesterman, Andrew. 1997. Memes of Translation: The Spread of Ideas in Translation Theory. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
De Sutter, Gert, Isabelle Delaere, and Koen Plevoets. 2012. “Lexical Lectometry in Corpusbased Translation Studies. Combining Profile-based Correspondence Analysis and Logistic Regression Modelling.” In Quantitative Methods in Corpus-based Translation Studies. A Practical Guide to Descriptive Translation Research, ed. by Michael P. Oakes and Ji Meng, 325–345. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Geeraerts, Dirk, Stefan Grondelaers, and Dirk Speelman. 1999. Convergentie en divergentie in de nederlandse woordenschat. Een onderzoek naar kleding- en voetbaltermen. Amsterdam: Meertens Instituut.
Greenacre, Michael. 2007. Correspondence Analysis in Practice 2nd ed. Boca Raton: Chapman and Hall/CRC.
Kenny, Dorothy. 1998. “Creatures of Habit? What Translators Usually do with Words.” Meta 43 (4): 515–523.
. 2000. “Lexical Hide-and-Seek: Looking for Creativity in a Parallel Corpus.” In Intercultural Faultlines: Research Models in Translation Studies: Textual and Cognitive Aspects, ed. by Maeve Olohan, 93–104. Manchester: St. Jerome.
Landauer, Thomas, and Susan Dumais. 1997. “A Solution to Plato’s Problem: The Latent Semantic Analysis Theory of Acquisition, Induction, and the Representation of Knowledge.” Psychological Review 104 (2): 211–240.
Macken, Lieve, Orphée De Clercq, and Hans Paulussen. 2011. “Dutch Parallel Corpus: A Balanced Copyright-Cleared Parallel Corpus.” Meta 56 (2): 374–390.
Malmkjær, Kirsten. 1997. “Punctuation in Hans Christian Andersen’s Stories and in their Translations into English.” In Nonverbal Communication and Translation, ed. by Fernando Poyatos, 151–162. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Mauranen, Anna. 2008. “Universal Tendencies in Translation.” In Incorporating Corpora: The Linguist and the Translator, ed. by Gunilla Anderman and Margaret Rogers, 32–48. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
May, Rachel. 1997. “Sensible Elocution: How Translation Works in & upon Punctuation.” The Translator 3 (1): 1–20.
Neumann, Stella. 2011. Contrastive Register Variation. A Quantitative Approach to the Comparison of English and German. Berlin and New York: de Gruyter.
Olohan, Maeve. 2008. “Scientific and Technical Translation.” In Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies. Second Edition, ed. by Mona Baker and Gabriela Saldanha, 240–43. London and New York: Routledge.
Olohan, Maeve, and Mona Baker. 2000. “Reporting that in Translated English: Evidence for Subconscious Processes of Explicitation?” Across Languages and Cultures 1 (2): 141–158.
Øverås, Linn. 1998. “In Search of the Third Code. An Investigation of Norms in Literary Translation.” Meta 43 (4): 557–570.
Penninckx, Willy, Paul Buyse, and Willy Smedts. 2001. Correct taalgebruik. Kortrijk-Heule: UGA.
Plevoets, Koen. 2008. Tussen spreek- en standaardtaal. Een corpusgebaseerd onderzoek naar de situationele, regionale en sociale verspreiding van enkele morfosyntactische verschijnselen uit het gesproken Belgisch–Nederlands. Doctoral dissertation. Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Leuven.
. In progress. “The Correspondence Analysis of Linguistic Profiles.”
Plevoets, Koen, Dirk Speelman, and Dirk Geeraerts. 2007. “The Distribution of t/v Pronouns in Netherlandic and Belgian Dutch.” In Variational Pragmatics, ed. by Klaus P. Schneider and Anne Barron, 181–209. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Puurtinen, Tiina. 2003. “Genre-specific Features of Translationese? Linguistic Differences between Translated and Non-translated Finnish Children’s Literature.” Literary and Linguistic Computing 18 (4): 389–406.
Pym, Anthony. 2008. “On Toury’s Laws of how Translators Translate.” In Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond. Investigations in Honor of Gideon Toury, ed. by Anthony Pym, Miriam Shlesinger, and Daniel Simeoni, 311–328. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Reiczigel, Jeno. 1996. “Bootstrap Tests in Correspondence Analysis.” Applied Stochastic Models and Data Analysis 12 (2): 107–117.
Salton, Gerard, Andrew Wong, and Chung-Shu Yang. 1975. “A Vector Space Model for Automatic Indexing.” Communications of the ACM 18 (1): 613–620.
Scott, Nelia. 1998. Normalisation and Readers’ Expectations: A Study of Literary Translation with Reference to Lispector’s A Hora Da Estrela. Doctoral dissertation. University of Liverpool.
Speelman, Dirk, Stefan Grondelaers, and Dirk Geeraerts. 2003. “Profile-based Linguistic Uniformity as a Generic Method for Comparing Language Varieties.” Computers and the Humanities 37 (3): 317–337.
Steiner, Erich. 2001. “Translations English-German: Investigating the Relative Importance of Systemic Contrasts and of the Text Type ‘translation’.” SPRIKreports 71: 1–49.
Stewart, Dominic. 2000. “Conventionality, Creativity, and Translated Text: The Implications of Electronic Corpora in Translation.” In Intercultural Faultlines. Research Models in Translation Studies: Textual and Cognitive Aspects, ed. by Maeve Olohan, 73–91. Manchester: St. Jerome.
Strang, Gilbert. 2009. Introduction to Linear Algebra. Wellesley: Wellesley-Cambridge Press.
Teich, Elke. 2003. Cross-linguistic Variation in System and Text. A Methodology for the Investigation of Translations and Comparable Texts. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter.
Toury, Gideon. 1995. Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Vanderauwera, Ria. 1985. Dutch Novels Translated into English: The Transformation of a “Minority” Literature. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Cited by (23)
Cited by 23 other publications
Cai, Yingying & Hendrik De Smet
2024. Are categories’ cores more isomorphic than their peripheries?. Frontiers in Communication 9 
Neumann, Stella, Elma Kerz & Arndt Heilmann
2024. Chapter 8. Comparing contact effects in translation and second language writing. In Constraints on Language Variation and Change in Complex Multilingual Contact Settings [Contact Language Library, 60], ► pp. 223 ff.
Niu, Jiang & Yue Jiang
2024. Does simplification hold true for machine translations? A corpus-based analysis of lexical diversity in text varieties across genres. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 11:1
Wang, Zhongliang, Andrew K F Cheung & Kanglong Liu
2024. Entropy-based syntactic tree analysis for text classification: a novel approach to distinguishing between original and translated Chinese texts. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities
de Baets, Pauline & Gert de Sutter
2023. How do translators select among competing (near-)synonyms in translation?. Target. International Journal of Translation Studies 35:1 ► pp. 1 ff.
Zhang, Xiaomin, Haidee Kotze & Jing Fang
2023. Hyper-conventional, unconventional, or “just right”? The interplay of normalisation and cross-linguistic influence in the use of modal particles in translated Chinese children’s literature. Meta 67:2 ► pp. 384 ff.
Gao, Jie
2022. An investigation of high-proficiency L2 English speakers' oral test performance: A profiling approach. Frontiers in Communication 7
Liu, Kanglong, Zhongzhu Liu & Lei Lei
2022. Simplification in translated Chinese: An entropy-based approach. Lingua 275 ► pp. 103364 ff.
Frankenberg-Garcia, Ana
2019. A corpus study of splitting and joining sentences in translation. Corpora 14:1 ► pp. 1 ff.
Vandevoorde, Lore
2019. Register, Source Language, and Cognateness Effects on Lexical Choice in Translated Dutch. Meta 63:3 ► pp. 627 ff.
Alasmri, Ibrahim & Haidee Kruger
2018. Conjunctive markers in translation from English to Arabic: a corpus-based study. Perspectives 26:5 ► pp. 767 ff.
Prieels, Lynn & Gert De Sutter
2018. Between language policy and language reality: a corpus-based multivariate study of the interlingual and intralingual subtitling practice in Flanders. Perspectives 26:3 ► pp. 322 ff.
Dybiec-Gajer, Joanna
2017. Looby, Robert. 2015. Censorship, Translation and English Language Fiction in People’s Poland. Target. International Journal of Translation Studies 29:2 ► pp. 344 ff.
Vandevoorde, Lore, Els Lefever, Koen Plevoets & Gert De Sutter
2017. A corpus-based study of semantic differences in translation. Target. International Journal of Translation Studies 29:3 ► pp. 388 ff.
Kruger, Haidee & Bertus van Rooy
Kruger, Haidee & Bertus van Rooy
2016. Syntactic and pragmatic transfer effects in reported-speech constructions in three contact varieties of English influenced by Afrikaans. Language Sciences 56 ► pp. 118 ff.
Ruette, Tom, Katharina Ehret & Benedikt Szmrecsanyi
2016. A lectometric analysis of aggregated lexical variation in written Standard English with Semantic Vector Space models. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 21:1 ► pp. 48 ff.
Cvrček, Václav & Lucie Chlumská
2015. Simplification in translated Czech: a new approach to type-token ratio. Russian Linguistics 39:3 ► pp. 309 ff.
Halverson, Sandra L.
2015. Cognitive Translation Studies and the merging of empirical paradigms. Translation Spaces 4:2 ► pp. 310 ff.
Halverson, Sandra L.
2017. Multimethod Approaches. In The Handbook of Translation and Cognition, ► pp. 193 ff.
Redelinghuys, Karien & Haidee Kruger
2015. Using the features of translated language to investigate translation expertise. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 20:3 ► pp. 293 ff.
Paulussen, Hans, Lieve Macken, Willy Vandeweghe & Piet Desmet
2013. Dutch Parallel Corpus: A Balanced Parallel Corpus for Dutch-English and Dutch-French. In Essential Speech and Language Technology for Dutch [Theory and Applications of Natural Language Processing, ], ► pp. 185 ff.
Sutter, Gert, Patrick Goethals, Torsten Leuschner & Sonia Vandepitte
2012. Towards methodologically more rigorous corpus-based translation studies. Across Languages and Cultures 13:2 ► pp. 137 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 10 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.