This paper explores the formulaicity of EU translations into
Polish across four institutional genres (legislation, judgments, reports,
websites) with reference to the corresponding EU English corpora in order to
understand how the degree of formulaicity is affected by the variable of genre.
Formulaicity is operationalised as lexical bundles – high-frequency multi-word
sequences (Biber and Barbieri 2007).
The study shows a strong correlation between formulaicity and genres, as well as
multiple facets of formulaicity (e.g. tokens vs. types). Our findings generally
confirm the increased aggregate formulaicity of translations as regards bundle
tokens for all EU genres, except for judgments, and the increased variation of
bundles (types) for all the genres at the 40 occurrences per million words (pmw)
threshold, although the “micro-formulaicity” threshold yielded inconclusive
results. Another finding reveals a consistently low overlap of bundles between
translations and non-translations. We argue that translations develop their own
formulaic profiles which are levelled out compared to EU English corpora and
which minimally overlap with formulaic profiles of domestic genres.
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