16.2450, Review: Translation/Corpus Ling: Olohan (2004)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-16-2450. Mon Aug 22 2005. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 16.2450, Review: Translation/Corpus Ling: Olohan (2004)

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1)
Date: 19-Aug-2005
From: Annelie Ädel < aadel at umich.edu >
Subject: Introducing Corpora in Translation Studies 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Mon, 22 Aug 2005 21:27:37
From: Annelie Ädel < aadel at umich.edu >
Subject: Introducing Corpora in Translation Studies 
 

AUTHOR: Olohan, Maeve
TITLE: Introducing Corpora in Translation Studies
PUBLISHER: Routledge (Taylor & Francis) 
YEAR: 2004
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/15/15-2700.html 

Annelie Ädel, English Language Institute, University of Michigan, Ann 
Arbor

SYNOPSIS

Maeve Olohan's "Introducing Corpora in Translation Studies" is an 
introductory work that explains how the analysis of corpus data can 
make a contribution to the study of translation. Its primary audience 
is "those who are familiar with translation studies but not corpora" (p. 
1), but it is clearly also of interest to those who already use corpora. It 
deals with the role of corpora in three areas of translation studies: (i) 
translation studies research, (ii) translator training and (iii) translation 
practice. For an indication of how firmly the focus is placed on the first 
of these, we might note that only 8 pages are dedicated to (ii) and 14 
to (iii) out of a total of 192 pages. The book documents the early years 
of corpora in translation studies (originating with Mona Baker's 1993 
book) and "gives an insight into some of the difficulties and 
achievements" (p. 1) so far.

Chapter 1 introduces translation studies research. It begins with a 
discussion of "the lack of consideration or relative invisibility of the 
translator" (p. 4) and ends with an overview of recent theoretical 
approaches taken in translation studies. The author makes it clear 
that she finds it more fruitful to consider the corpus-based approach a 
methodology than to consider it a "paradigm" of its own. Chapter 2 
gives a brief introduction to corpus linguistics and descriptive 
translation studies. It then summarises recent translation research that 
has made use of corpus-linguistic tools.
 
Chapters 3 and 4 deal with parallel and comparable corpora, 
respectively. Chapter 3 is critical of the way in which parallel corpora 
have traditionally been used in contrastive linguistics. In Olohan's 
analysis, instead of showing interest in the translation process per se, 
researchers have considered the translations in the corpus "first and 
foremost a reflection of the possibilities offered by the target language 
system" (p. 24). In chapter 4, the use of comparable corpora in 
translation studies is reviewed, with special attention given to research 
that aims to find universal features of translated language (according 
to Baker's original suggestion in 1995). The kind of comparable 
corpus work discussed here "argues in favour of studying translations 
without looking directly at source texts or at the relationship between 
source and target text" (p. 43). 

Chapter 5 is about corpus design, especially as it applies to 
translation studies. It also gives a range of practical advice on corpus 
compilation, even paying attention to the often neglected issue of 
copyright and difficulties in obtaining permissions. The chapter does 
not go into much technical detail. Alignment, for example, is treated 
quite briefly. Olohan ends the chapter by turning our attention to six 
different corpora used in translation studies research, by summing up 
the design criteria used.

Chapter 6 generally describes corpus tools and data analysis. Like 
most introductory textbooks on corpus linguistics, it describes 
phenomena like concordances and POS-tags. It also provides some 
simple quantitative measures, primarily frequency lists, type/token 
ratio and keywords. It is understandable that the author wishes to give 
the intended audience a basic introduction to primarily monolingual 
corpus tools, but the next edition will hopefully include more than a 
page on tools that directly apply to translation studies.

Chapters 7 and 8 summarise previous and current corpus-based 
research in translation studies. Chapter 7 revolves around the idea 
that translated language is "characterized by specific, identifiable 
features that may be related to the nature of the translation activity 
itself" (p. 90). The features of translation on which the author focusses 
are explicitation, normalization, simplification and "levelling-out" (all 
suggested by Baker in the mid-1990s). Olohan also includes four of 
her own case studies to illustrate in more detail how corpus-linguistic 
methods can be used to explore these features. Chapter 8, 
entitled "Translators, style and ideology", primarily gives suggestions 
for how to use corpora to analyse a translator's style, briefly reviewing 
some of the literature on stylometry and stylistics. The ideology aspect 
is merely touched upon. Two of the author's own case studies 
conclude the chapter, which look at contraction patterns and lexical 
choices using keyword analysis.

Chapters 9 and 10 shift the focus from theory and research methods 
to useful applications for students of translation and professional 
translators. The chapters are aptly called "Corpora in translator 
training" and "Corpora in translation practice". The former focuses on 
suggestions for the use of parallel and comparable corpora by 
students and teachers of translation. The latter gives examples of how 
corpus methods can be used in technical as well as literary 
translation. It also gives a brief outline of corpus availability on the 
internet.

The three-page Conclusion is used to highlight some of the "more 
salient issues raised in the volume and touch upon potential future 
developments in the use of corpora in translation studies" (p. 190). 
Here, Olohan brings up the necessity of building corpora of translation 
for a larger number of languages. She also concedes that her 
book "will appear to have foregrounded research into literary 
translation" (p. 191) and goes on to motivate why this should be the 
case. Olohan draws attention to the fact that corpus-based studies of 
translation overwhelmingly deal with contemporary texts and 
encourages diachronic perspectives on translation studies research, 
specifically in order to explore the influence of norms. She goes on to 
argue that there is "still scope for continued cross-fertilization" (p. 191) 
between translation studies and other disciplines, giving stylometric 
methods as a prominent example of a discipline that has contributed 
to studies of translator style. Another promising method that Olohan 
draws attention to is the "dual approach" (p. 192) of combining 
findings from comparable and parallel corpus analyses. 

The final point Olohan highlights in the Conclusion is that finding 
richer causal models (involving the formulation and testing of 
explanatory and predictive hypotheses) is both desirable and 
achievable, but only if we combine corpus techniques with other 
analytical tools: "we need to study not just the texts but the translation 
situation, from perspectives that are social, cultural, historical, political, 
cognitive, and so on" (p. 192).

All chapters end with a brief passage of recommendations for further 
reading. The majority of chapters also include a final section 
called "Discussion and research points". There is also a three-page 
glossary, which, although helpful, is surprisingly brief (there is, for 
example, no definition of a comparable or parallel corpus). Also, 
judging from the lack of consistency in the definitions, the glossary 
would have benefitted from further editing.

EVALUATION

Olohan's textbook will, no doubt, be a "must read" not just among 
researchers in translation studies interested in corpus methods, but 
also among corpus linguists interested in translation. Reading this 
book is an excellent way to get up do date with recent developments 
in the use of corpus methodology in translation studies. The chapter 
on corpus design is a particularly excellent introduction with plenty of 
good advice and tips for the amateur corpus compiler. Not 
surprisingly, references to Olohan 2004 are already showing up in 
other publications in the field, such as Aijmer & Alvstad (2005:1) who 
argue that "[t]he methods of corpus linguistics and the use of corpora 
have become an [...] important tool in translation studies reflecting the 
growth of computer technologies and the use of corpora in general 
linguistics (Laviosa 2002, Olohan 2004)".

On the whole, the discussion and research points that end every 
chapter address relevant and useful issues. Only occasionally do the 
questions extend much beyond the book itself, as in the case of a 
question about identifying "points at which translation studies adopted 
ideas, theories and methods from contrastive linguistics" (p. 34). The 
question is raised despite the fact that contrastive linguistics is not 
described in any systematic way, which makes it impossible to answer 
without more background from some other source. Also, I find 
somewhat ungenerous the fact that contrastive linguistics is dealt with 
from the perspective of no more than one article (Altenberg 1998).

The chapter on corpus tools and data analysis mainly deals with 
general concordancing tools for monolingual corpora. There is only 
one page of running text on bilingual concordancing (p. 75) in 
particular, which is surprising. Even semantic prosody is given more 
space, although it is not treated from a translation perspective at all. 
The final section on statistics will probably also leave most readers 
wondering whether any particularly useful measures exist that apply to 
translation. In other words, the chapter could have been more 
targeted to translation. As it stands, only 3 pages out of 28 deal 
directly with translation.

Several case studies from the author's work in progress are presented 
in chapter 7. These studies are generally interesting and the budding 
corpus-using translation researcher will doubtless find plenty of food 
for thought here. Only occasionally do the case studies make the 
chapter (by far the longest chapter of the book) seem overly rich in 
information. For example, the chapter confusingly re-uses the same 
table three times (7.7, 7.11, 7.17), instead of referring back to one 
single table.

The chapter on corpora in translator training is only 8 pages long, 
which makes it the shortest chapter of the book. It would have been 
highly interesting to have more background here. For example, a 
discussion of questions like "How widely used are corpora in translator 
training?" and "Are they becoming the norm?" would have been useful.

The chapter on corpora in translation practice contains a section 
called "Web as corpus", which takes a somewhat naive approach. The 
only argument mentioned against using the web as a corpus is that 
the "results will not appear in a format appropriate for browsing 
linguistic data" (p. 184). Fundamental issues in corpus design are 
conspicuously absent, like representativeness, reliability (the extent to 
which an investigation yields the same results on repeated trials) and 
verifiability (whether other researchers who have access to your 
material can verify or falsify your results), which enable researchers to 
make generalizations about language use. Related to this overly 
insouciant view of what a corpus is is another point that I would have 
liked to see discussed more, namely, the claim that a translation 
memory "may be regarded as a type of parallel corpus" (p. 187). This 
is misleading from the point of view of (attempted) representativeness 
being a basic characteristic of a corpus, as defined by corpus 
linguists. A translation memory does have aligned sentences in two 
different languages, but the resemblance to an actual linguistic corpus 
basically ends there.

The book shows a laudable awareness of the common Anglo-
American bias in corpus linguistics and explicitly states a desire to 
spread the use of corpora to a larger number of languages. The latter 
is emphasised as a "salient issue" in the book--it is important that "we 
continue to expand the languages for which we build corpora for 
translation" (p. 190)--although such statements are more or less 
restricted to the Conclusion. Chapter 10 does include a section on 
the "availability of corpus resources worldwide", but it gives a fairly 
insular impression in that only the UK and the main languages 
relevant to the situation in the UK are mentioned.

The absence of any discussion of machine translation (MT) is 
noteworthy. MT is a large area of corpus application on the basis of 
number of translations performed, yet it is only mentioned twice--in 
passing. Of course, Olohan is certainly not the only culprit in this 
respect and, considering that translation studies is an emerging field, 
with the use of corpora being particularly recent ("spanning no more 
than ten years", p. 1), it is to be expected that there will be discussion 
regarding delimitations and definitions. I do think, however, that the 
intended audience will be left wondering why MT is not offered some 
space in a large publication on corpora in translation studies, 
especially since chapters on translation training and translation 
practice are included. Furthermore, since translation studies "is the 
academic discipline that concerns itself with the study of translation" 
(p. 1), the potential and limitations of MT should be highly relevant 
topics.  

Olohan's book is written in a lucid style and the topics are presented 
in a clear manner. (My main complaint concerning reader-friendliness 
is that more illustrations would have made it even clearer.) Yet 
another merit of "Introducing Corpora in Translation Studies" is that it 
is unusually balanced for an introductory book. The fact that it 
concludes that corpus techniques "can only go so far on its own" and 
that they will "play a vital role in combination with a range of other 
approaches and methods" (p. 192) seems to suggest that corpus 
linguistics is becoming more mature.

REFERENCES

Aijmer, Karin & Cecilia Alvstad. 2005. "Introduction". In Aijmer, K. & C. 
Alvstad (eds) New Tendencies in Translation Studies: Selected 
Papers from a Workshop Göteborg 12 December 2003. Göteborg: 
Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis. Gothenburg Studies in English 90. 
University of Gothenburg.

Altenberg, Bengt. 1988. "Connectors and Sentence Openings in 
English and Swedish". In S. Johansson & S. Oksefjell (eds) Corpora 
and Cross-Linguistic Research. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Baker, Mona. 1993. "Corpus Linguistics and Translation Studies: 
Implications and Applications". In M. Baker, G. Francis & E. Tognini-
Bonelli (eds) Text and Technology: In Honour of John Sinclair. 
Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Baker, Mona. 1995. "Corpora in Translation Studies: An Overview and 
Some Suggestions for Future Research". Target 7: 223-243. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Annelie Ädel is a postdoctoral fellow at the English Language Institute 
of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She earned her Ph.D. in 
English Linguistics from Göteborg University, Sweden, in 2003. Her 
research interests include text and corpus linguistics, discourse 
analysis, translation and contrastive linguistics. She has presented her 
work at conferences in Sweden, Norway, Italy, Spain, Belgium, the UK 
and the US, and recently spent two years as a visiting scholar at 
Boston University. She combines her research and teaching with work 
as a professional translator.





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