Abstract
This paper focuses on one particular parallel development in linguistics and translation studies, namely corpus-based analysis of language use. Recent years have seen the compilation of corpora of translations, designed specifically to investigate the language and features of translation, usually by comparing translations with non-translations. Some of the interactions between corpus linguistics and corpus-based translation studies are traced in terms of perceptions of translated texts and underlying assumptions of corpus-based studies. Corpus-based translation studies is placed in the con¬text of current theoretical trends in translation studies and, through brief re¬ference to research which has aimed to investigate potential features of translation, attention is drawn to the importance of contextualising translation by combining corpus-based investigations with other kinds of methodologies and analyses.
Highlights
Translation in corpus linguisticsFrom the perspective of a translation scholar interested in corpus-based translation studies, it is immediately striking that the range of areas of language studies dealt with in general introductions to corpus linguistics (e.g. Biber, Conrad & Reppen 1998; McEnery & Wilson 2001; Kennedy 1998) does not include translation
This paper focuses on one particular parallel development in linguistics and translation studies, namely corpus-based analysis of language use
From the perspective of a translation scholar interested in corpus-based translation studies, it is immediately striking that the range of areas of language studies dealt with in general introductions to corpus linguistics (e.g. Biber, Conrad & Reppen 1998; McEnery & Wilson 2001; Kennedy 1998) does not include translation
Summary
From the perspective of a translation scholar interested in corpus-based translation studies, it is immediately striking that the range of areas of language studies dealt with in general introductions to corpus linguistics (e.g. Biber, Conrad & Reppen 1998; McEnery & Wilson 2001; Kennedy 1998) does not include translation. Tony McEnery and Andrew Wilson (2001), for example, cover numerous topics within linguistics: lexical studies, grammar, semantics, pragmatics and discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, stylistics and text linguistics, historical linguistics, dialectology and variation studies and psycholinguistics. They deal with related fields: the teaching of languages and linguistics, cultural studies and social psychology. To what extent can we make generalizations based on translated texts? And can we really be sure that the same meanings are expressed in the source and the target text? Or should we rather think in terms of degrees or types of equivalence? [...] Most seriously, to what extent can we take translated texts to be representative of ordinary language use? Translated texts may differ from original texts because of source language influence [...] there may be general features which characterize translated texts (Johansson 1998:6)
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