Abstract
This project is based on a corpus of English and German source and target texts, ranging from contemporary literature to scientific textbooks. We try to create a machine-readable and aligned corpus which will allow us to discover and categorize translation equivalents for a number of linguistic items, such as prepositions, subordination, deictic elements, metaphors or culture-specific structures. On this basis we look for regularities in the configuration of factors that influence equivalent choices for each of the phenomena in question. Apart from theoretical insights into contrastive language structures as well as cognitive aspects of the translation process, the purpose of the project is to discover and categorize prototye and non-prototype equivalents in two closely related languages. Research results could, for instance, be applied to bilingual lexicography or other language learning and translation aids.
Highlights
This project is based on a corpus of English and German source and target texts, ranging from contemporary literature to scientific textbooks
Analyses will be carried out parallel, but each team will be responsible for separate sections of the comparison
As we wanted to exclude learner language and interference phenomena as far as possible, we only took translations that were not made for teaching and testing purposes, texts that could be assumed to have been translated “for a real purpose” carefully and by professionals, so that the quality of the work could remain unquestioned up to a certain point. This lead us to three types of public translation domains: a) international publishers, where internationally interesting books and articles from one language and culture are transferred into another language or culture, b) international agencies, where information has to be distributed to various national agencies, and c) bicultural institutions, where texts from one target culture have to be translated for a readership in another target-culture
Summary
As we wanted to exclude learner language and interference phenomena as far as possible, we only took translations that were not made for teaching and testing purposes (i.e. from schools), texts that could be assumed to have been translated “for a real purpose” carefully and by professionals, so that the quality of the work could remain unquestioned up to a certain point This lead us to three types of public translation domains: a) international publishers (and newspapers), where internationally interesting books and articles from one language and culture are transferred into another language or culture, b) international agencies, where information has to be distributed to various national agencies, and c) bicultural institutions, where texts from one target culture have to be translated for a readership in another target-culture. A different problem arises with tourist brochures: regional tourist boards in Germany and Britain often seem to prefer unprofessional doit-yourself strategies, so that the target-language versions are unsatisfactorily rendered from a native-speaker perspective (cf 5.2 below).4 Many of these compilation problems may be due to culture-specific and text-type specific traditions. English originals would not be translated into Norwegian either
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