Keyness, Context, and Cultural Specificity in Indirect Translation

Abstract

The translation of references specific to a given source culture has long been a prominent, and often problematic aspect of translation practice and research. In indirect translation, or the translation of already translated material, linguistic and cultural differences accumulate, meaning that the omission of cultural references (CRs) or culture-specific items (CSIs) might be a generally expected outcome. Yet before such hypotheses can be tested, research methods are needed that can account for broad patterns across whole texts, and preferably, across semantic categories, genres, time periods, and languages. A ‘textual’ approach, focused on the linguistic context in which CRs are likely to occur, should complement the currently dominant ‘cultural’ approach, which mainly relies on predefined categories and intuition for the selection of objects of study. This article illustrates that corpus research, and particularly keyness analysis, can aid in uncovering recurrent structural patterns and textual functions in which CRs are expected to pose translation difficulties. In this regard, it focuses on expressions of enumeration, or lists, and indicators of identification, or voice. Based on a trilingual (English, French, and Italian) corpus-assisted study of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and John Cary’s An Essay on the State of England (1695), the article accentuates the productive complementarity of numerical operations and context-sensitive readings.