Corpus-based Translation Studies Research Articles

Does simplification hold true for machine translations? A corpus-based analysis of lexical diversity in text varieties across genres

Extensive studies have described the linguistic features of human translations and verified the existence of the simplification translation universal. However, little has been known about the linguistic features of machine translations, although machine translation, as a unique modality of translation, has become an integral part of translation practice. This study is intended to test whether the simplification translation universal observed in human translations also holds true for machine translations. If so, are simplification features in machine translations different significantly from those in human translations? And does genre significantly affect simplification features? To this end, we built a balanced comparable corpus containing three text varieties, i.e., machine translations, human translations and target-language originals across three genres namely contemporary novels, government documents and academic abstracts. Based on the corpus, we conducted a systematic comparison of lexical diversity, as a proxy for simplification, of different text varieties. The results show that simplification is corroborated overall in both machine and human translations when compared with target-language originals, and machine translations are more simplified than human translations. Additionally, genre is found to exert a significant influence on the lexical diversity of different text varieties. This study is expected to expand the scope of corpus-based translation studies on the one hand and to offer insights into the improvement of machine translation systems on the other hand.

The translation teaching platform based on multilingual corpora of Xi Jinping: The Governance of China: Design, resources and applications

Over the last two decades, the domain of corpus-based translation studies has evolved into a significant paradigm, instrumental in probing a diverse array of scholarly inquiries. This article demonstrates the various uses of corpus analysis techniques that have gained popularity in translation studies, and it presents a new multilingual corpus. This corpus showcases the evolving nature of the field as it expands to accommodate new conceptual frameworks and methodologies. In addition to addressing the use of corpora in translating, learning, and analyzing translation within the context of multilingual corpora and machine translation, this article reports on a pilot project concerning the construction of an AI-based translation teaching platform. Utilizing multilingual corpora, the platform aims to create a foundation for extensive translation instruction and multilingual training at the tertiary level. Following a discussion on the evolution of corpus-based approaches in translation studies and their connection to the growth of translation education as a profession, the paper describes the actual design of the platform. This includes the theoretical framework, the methodology of annotation, and the execution of the software programme. These corpora are relevant not only to individuals studying translation but also to the related multilingual corpora, comprising collections of originals and their translations in the same language.

Corpus-based Translation Studies: Examining Media Language through a Linguistic Lens

This paper delves into the multifaceted world where translation studies converge with corpus linguistics, casting a spotlight on the dynamic domain of media language. By harnessing the power of a corpus-based methodology, our research meticulously dissects the intricate process of translating and adapting media texts within a panoply of linguistic landscapes and cultural contexts. The core objective of the study is to excavate and analyze the pantheon of linguistic attributes and the repertoire of tactics translators wield in the realm of media, unlocking a treasure trove of understanding pertaining to cultural subtleties and the nuanced art of translation practices. Our exploration traverses a broad spectrum of media genres, encompassing the rigor of news journalism, the creative complexity of television programming, and the viral nature of digital content, to construct a comprehensive understanding of the translation phenomena at play. The findings illuminate the myriad ways in which media narratives are reconfigured and presented to global audiences, ultimately enriching the discourse on how translation shapes and is shaped by the currents of worldwide communication. This study, therefore, serves as a crucial beacon for academics, professionals, and enthusiasts poised at the crossroads of linguistics and cultural exchange, guiding them through the labyrinth of media translation and its profound influence on international dialogues and perceptions.

Integrating interview-based approaches into corpus-based translation studies and literary translation studies

Abstract The article discusses the increasing role of corpus data in translation studies (a field that has developed several autonomous sub-fields striving for full recognition), including mediated interviews of literary translators as paratexts complementing textual analysis in the translated text circulation, appreciation, and evaluation. The question of corpus design should be envisaged in conjunction with corpus usability, i.e. fitness for purpose. In this respect, it is important to train awareness of the potential of corpora of mediated interviews in real-life settings, in literary translation research and work environments. Furthermore, the article is intended to contribute to building more productive and innovative interfaces of corpus-based translation studies and literary translation studies in the digital humanities era, as well as to provide tools meant to bridge the gap between theory and practice.

Exploitation and Evaluation of an Arabic-English Composite Learner Translator Corpus

This paper describes in depth the data collection and exploitation stages in constructing the undergraduate learner translator corpus (ULTC), a 75 million-word sentence-aligned bidirectional parallel corpus of Arabic, English, and French, with Arabic as its central language. We focus on the methodological challenges, and describe the compilation process and problems encountered in the first phase of the project. Our aim is to inform future compilers of similar projects that integrate learner corpus research (LCR) and corpus-based translation studies (CBTS). In the first part, we present design considerations, data collection criteria, and the exploitation of the corpus, and in the second part, we evaluate the systems we used and possible improvements

Лексикография сегодня и завтра:The Future of Dictionaries, Dictionaries of the Future

The paper shows that traditional ways of introducing new lexicographic items into the terminology of Russian, such as calquing (literal translation), transliteration and transcription from a foreign language, cannot be used in translating contemporary English extended digital terminology. New items cannot be rendered word by word because of their language-specific character. Contemporary corpus-based translation studies reveal that language use in translat-ed and non-translated texts differs considerably on all linguistic levels — lexical, grammatical, and discursive, and these phenomena are not lexicographically fixed yet. Most of these differ-ences were interpreted as direct evidence for the so-called translation universals, such as ex-plicitation, simplification and normalization, that are supposed to be incorporated into the fu-ture digital lexicographic products.

Book Review

The field of corpus-based translation studies (CBTS) relies on corpus-linguistic methods and tools to analyze electronic corpora of authentic translations. Since its emergence in the early 1990s under the impetus of Mona Baker, CBTS has grown to become a recognized area of research in translation studies. By offering an overview of the field and presenting a variety of fresh perspectives provided by leading experts, The book Extending the Scope of Corpus-Based Translation Studies extends the scope of CBTS in multiple ways, and sheds light on the future of the translation industry.

Sketching the changing patterns in kaleidoscopes: New developments in corpus-based studies of translation features (2001–2021)

Corpus-based Translation Studies (CTS) have developed and advanced substantially since its emergence in the 1990s. This article provides an overview of the evolution of CTS from 2001 to 2021, identifying new challenges and research opportunities. The evolution of CTS is presented into two stages: the establishment of the subject matter and the expansion of research, respectively. We argue that CTS may enter the stage when the traditional specialties, such as using corpora in contrastive linguistics and translation, continue to advance, while a variety of new research points emerge and expand. After outlining current problems and unresolved issues, the analysis presents newly emerged research areas, assumptions, perspectives, and cross-fertilization with neighboring disciplines as the new developments in CTS. Four possible trends in CTS are framed and presented accordingly. The analysis highlights the significant advancements made in CTS over the past two decades and provides a valuable resource for researchers and practitioners interested in understanding the current state of CTS, and the directions it may take in the future.

Introduction: The ascent of corpus-based translation studies

The pervasiveness of corpus-based research in the broad interdisciplinary field of translation studies is well attested. This editorial briefly reports on some of the most significant academic initiatives undertaken in corpus-based translation studies in recent years. It introduces each of the eight papers selected for this special issue of Research in Corpus Linguistics (RiCL). In doing so, the editorial will highlight their distinctive contribution to the interdisciplinarity of translation and interpreting studies.

Quelle traduction ! A study of the translation of French quel and English what exclamatives in political discourse

This paper reports on a study of the translation of English what and French quel exclamatives spoken in European Parliament proceedings into French and English respectively. It explores how these meaning-laden constructions are translated in practice as well as the translation of associated degree modifying and performative elements. This paper also argues that corpus-based translation studies can contribute to the debate surrounding the definition of the embedded (non-matrix) exclamatives and touches upon the comparative use of these exclamatives in the two languages.

Innovation and Expansion: A New Point of Departure in Corpus-Based Translation Studies

Innovation and Expansion: A New Point of Departure in Corpus-Based Translation Studies

Review of Extending the Scope of Corpus-Based Translation Studies

Review of Extending the Scope of Corpus-Based Translation Studies

Quantitative questions on big data in translation studies

As corpus-based translation studies continues to expand, researchers have employed data analytic techniques from neighbouring disciplines, such as corpus linguistics, to explore a wider variety of research questions. The field has evolved from early frequency-based approaches to corpus-based translation studies to now include more advanced statistical analyses to understand the complex web of variables encapsulated by the translation process. Big data analytic techniques that originated in data analytics and related quantitative fields could be usefully applied to research questions in translation and interpreting studies. To assess their applicability, this article first outlines what distinguishes big data from general corpora in translation and interpreting studies, identifying how data volume, variety, and velocity are applicable properties to be considered in corpus-based translation and interpreting studies research. Then, the article presents three types of big data analysis techniques, namely crosslingual and multilingual data analysis, sentiment analysis, and visual analysis. These analyses are presented in conjunction with potential research areas that would benefit from these complementary analytical approaches. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of big data analytics in corpus translation studies, while charting the trajectory of a more quantitative, corpus-based approach to translation studies.

Revisiting simplification in corpus-based translation studies: Insights from readability research

Ever since the publication of Laviosa’s (1998a; 1998b) pioneering work, the study of lexico-syntactic simplification has held centre stage in corpus translation research concerned with the typical features of translated texts. The simplification hypothesis states that translated texts are simpler than non-translated texts. The convergence hypothesis, also discussed by Laviosa (1998a; 1998b), but less so in follow-up studies, is that translated texts are more homogeneous than original texts, that is they display less variance. To date, simplification has mostly been operationalised in CBTS as type-token ratio, lexical density, core vocabulary coverage, list head coverage and average sentence length. Relying on these parameters, previous research has produced mixed results, with simplification varying across translation modalities, language pairs and registers. The present article sets out to revisit the simplification and convergence hypotheses through the lens of NLP-informed readability research. In particular, we rely on a larger set of simplification indicators and make use of multivariate statistical techniques. We present a simplification study of Europarl corpus data in French translated from English and in non-translated French. The results show that translated French is simpler than original French, lexically and syntactically. We also find evidence of convergence that shows that translators smooth out cross-speaker lexical heterogeneity in translated parliamentary proceedings.

Simplification in translated Chinese: An entropy-based approach

For a long time, translation researchers, particularly those working in corpus-based translation studies, have held the presumption that translated texts tend to be simpler in lexical and syntactical features than non-translated native texts. Such claims have led to the formulation of the simplification universal hypothesis in translation studies. However, this line of research which focuses predominantly on the investigation of individual linguistic features has failed to provide sufficient evidence to confirm the existence of the simplification universal. To a large extent, the lack of global quantitative indicators for evaluating the complexity level of the translated and non-translated texts has hindered progress in this field. The current study, using entropy as an indicator, analysed the linguistic complexity between translated and native Chinese from the information-theoretical perspective. Our research found that translational Chinese tends to be simpler than its non-translated counterpart at the lexical level based on unigram entropy, but not the syntactic level based on part-of-speech entropy. Our study has confirmed the use of entropy as a reliable measure for lexical and syntactic complexity in the field of translation studies.

Translating (and rewriting) Jane Austen’s food across time and space

ABSTRACT This study incorporates House’s TQA framework into corpus-based translation studies to evaluate how Jane Austen’s depictions of food have been translated and perceived within Chinese contexts. This study’s dataset includes a Jane Austen corpus in English compiled by Lancaster University and our self-built diachronic corpus of Austen’s translations in Chinese from 1935 onwards. Our study shows that translations of Austen’s references to food require a dynamicity that bridges time and space and which links cultures and languages; the translations create texts that are novel and original to Chinese audiences. Different strategies have been used by translators to connect food culture in Austen’s era to contemporary China. Translations initially recreated and domesticated original textual references within Chinese culture, while later translations were more contemporary and closer to modern day Western dishes and customs. This study also shows that terminological inconsistency, translation loss, and mistranslation have existed in Chinese translations of Austen since 1935. This research outlines how translators have bridged the temporal distance and cultural space between the epochs of 19th century Britain and modern China in the context of literary depictions of food.

Corpus Linguistics and Translation Studies: Interaction and Reaction

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.

Syntactic complexity in translated and non-translated texts: A corpus-based study of simplification.

This study approaches the investigation of the simplification hypotheses in corpus-based translation studies from a syntactic complexity perspective. The research is based on two comparable corpora, the English monolingual part of COCE (Corpus of Chinese-English) and the native English corpus of FLOB (Freiburg-LOB Corpus of British English). Using the 13 syntactic complexity measures falling into five subconstructs (i.e. length of production unit, amount of subordination, amount of coordination, phrasal complexity and overall sentence complexity), our results show that translation as a whole is less complex compared to non-translation, reflected most prominently in the amount of subordination and overall sentence complexity. Further pairwise comparison of the four subgenres of the corpora shows mixed results. Specifically, the translated news is homogenous to native news as evidenced by the complexity measures; the translated genres of general prose and academic writing are less complex compared to their native counterparts while translated fiction is more complex than non-translated fiction. It was found that mean sentence length always produced a significant effect on syntactic complexity, with higher syntactic complexity for longer sentence lengths in both corpora. ANOVA test shows a highly significant main effect of translation status, with higher syntactic complexity in the non-translated texts (FLOB) than the translated texts (COCE), which provides support for the simplification hypothesis in translation. It is also found that, apart from translation status, genre is an important variable in affecting the complexity level of translated texts. Our study offers new insights into the investigation of simplification hypothesis from the perspective of translation from English into Chinese.

Speaker-Audience Interaction in Spoken Political Discourse : A Contrastive Parallel Corpus-Based Study of English-Persian Translation of Metadiscourse Features in TED Talks

Metadiscourse features refer to those elements by which interaction between writer-reader and/or speaker-audience is constructed. Taking this into account, the objective of this contrastive parallel corpus-based study was to explore the way metadiscourse features were used and distributed in the English discourse and their translation in the Persian language as well as analyzing the speaker-audience interaction in translation. For this purpose, 30 different TED talks in politics were randomly selected to ensure the issues of corpus representativeness and balance. The corpus consisted of 21681 tokens in English and 21164 tokens in Persian. For classifying the metadiscourse features, the model introduced by Hyland (Metadiscourse: exploring interaction in writing. Continuum, London, 2005), whose model is classified into two main subcategories of interactive and interactional, was employed. The quantitative analysis showed that overall the number of interactional metadiscourse features was used more than that of the interactive ones in both corpora. Moreover, the results of the Chi-square test revealed that there was statistically no significant difference between the distributional pattern of metadiscourse features in English corpus and their Persian translation. The qualitative analysis revealed that there were four kinds of changes in translation as (im) explicit change, (dis)information change, (in) visibility change, and (de)emphasis change. Besides, the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the corpus revealed that the interaction between the speakers of the TED talks and the audience did not change when metadiscourse features translated from English into Persian. The results of this research can be found useful for researchers in contrastive analysis, translation studies, and corpus-based translation studies.

Hedging in interpreted and spontaneous speeches: a comparative study of Chinese and American political press briefings

AbstractThe investigation of potential stylistic differences between translated and non-translated texts has been proven to be a promising line in corpus-based translation studies, yet similar research on the product of interpreting seems both smaller in scale and slower in development. This study compares the use of hedges in interpreted and spontaneous English speeches collected in similar settings. Specifically, we gathered the two types of speech data from Chinese and American political press briefings respectively and analyzed their differences in the employment of various hedging devices. The results show that interpreted speeches not only contain significantly fewer hedges but they are also dependent on a narrower range of such devices than spontaneous speeches, which is consistent with the tendency towards simplification in translations. Also, our findings suggest that interpreted and spontaneous speeches tend to follow distinct hedging patterns in terms of preferred linguistic choices. Potential factors triggering such differences are discussed.