16.673, Review: Translation/Corpus Ling: Santos (2004)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-16-673. Mon Mar 07 2005. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 16.673, Review: Translation/Corpus Ling: Santos (2004)

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1)
Date: 07-Mar-2005
From: Svetlana Kurtes < sk253 at yahoo.com >
Subject: Translation-Based Corpus Studies 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Mon, 07 Mar 2005 22:35:28
From: Svetlana Kurtes < sk253 at yahoo.com >
Subject: Translation-Based Corpus Studies 
 

AUTHOR: Santos, Diana 
TITLE: Translation-based Corpus Studies
SUBTITLE: Contrasting English and Portuguese tense and aspect systems
SERIES: Language and computers: Studies in practical
linguistics, No 50
PUBLISHER: Rodopi
YEAR: 2004
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/15/15-2013.html


Svetlana Kurtes, Language Centre, University of Cambridge, UK

SYNOPSIS

The volume presents a rewriting of the author's doctoral 
dissertation 'Tense and aspect in English and Portuguese: a contrastive 
semantic study' (Santos 1996), in an attempt to make clearer some 
methodological, theoretical and practical issues that arose in the course 
of the work on the dissertation. The intended readership is envisaged to 
be a range of specialists working in corpus linguistics, grammatical 
categories of tense and aspect, semantics, translation theory and 
contrastive analysis, given the fact that the author uses translation 
corpora, aligned translation corpora, to be more precise, as the empirical 
semantic data for her research of tense and aspect. 

The volume is composed of six chapters: Introduction; Parallel corpora and 
contrastive studies; Tense, aspect and semantics; The translation network; 
Corpus studies; Language engineering, evaluation and applications. 
Preface; References. 

Chapter 1 explains in more detail what the book offers and presents its 
layout. The author gives an introductory definition of aspect, stating 
that it 'is a verbal category in (among others) Slavic languages, in which 
a verb can have imperfective of perfective aspect. The notion of aspect is 
related to matters like completeness, iterativity, internal (temporal) 
perspective, etc. In other words, these are words and concepts usually 
employed to explain its meaning' (p.7). 

In Chapter 2 the author elaborates further on the importance of 
translation theory to linguistics, generally, and contrastive studies, 
more specifically. By discussing what relevant facts actual translation 
performance can offer, Santos points out that 'the best way to carry out 
contrastive studies is precisely to study actual translation, and not to 
postulate abstract categories/rules and provide analyses of data which are 
flawed from the start by the unreality of [a priori postulated] "universal 
constructs", [...] heavily loaded with untestable hypotheses (articles of 
faith) and data carefully tuned to present only the cases that support 
[the] theory' (p.16; also Nagao 1988; Tobin 1993; Engh 1998). By adopting 
a more holistic view on language, and taking translation material, be it 
competence or performance, as the basis his/her analysis, the analyst will 
be 'able to produce a consistent description of an enormous amount of 
detailed differences' (p. 17). A good example of a practical contrastive 
study undertaking the approach is the seminal work by Vinay and Darbelnet 
(1977), Stylistique Comparée, where different styles are analysed by 
looking into the ways they are actualised and reflected in different text 
organizations, different grammars and different lexicon. Their aim was 'to 
elicit the differences between texts produced by monolingual brains in 
comparable situations' (ibid.), and by achieving it, they managed to bring 
to light many more differences between the observed languages and produce 
a detailed descriptive account of the analysed languages. 

Santos' work is corpus-based and her main standpoint maintains that 
translation studies do not deal only with abstract concepts and 'global 
notions such as explicitation and simplification which are independent of 
specific languages' (Baker 1996: 185), but equally well with semantic, 
syntactic and lexical features of the languages in question. Paraphrasing 
the famous Jakobson's dictum stating that 'languages differ essentially in 
what they must convey and not in what they may convey' (1959: 236), the 
author sees translation as a bridge between the two language systems and 
concludes that 'languages differ in what they do convey, even if they can 
convey the same' (p.23).

Chapter 3, entitled 'Tense, aspect and semantics', gives a succinct 
discussion on the issues. The author embraces the relativist standpoint, 
maintaining that 'each language is one original way to encode a culture 
and a way of looking at the world, and therefore should be studied for its 
own sake, and neither as a parameterised difference from a group of 
languages nor as yet another instantiation of the same thing [...] (p.27). 
A host of literature inspired by Chomskyan linguistics takes essentially 
an untenable position by devising theoretical models that suit the 
structure of the English language mainly (if not exclusively) and analyse 
the other languages as deviating from that 'universal' norm. Santos looks 
more closely into Smith's (1991) parametric approach to aspect and shows 
that the three hypothesized situation types, purportedly universal, and 
the three viewpoints -- perfective, imperfective and neutral -- find their 
perfect match only in the structure of English, while in all the other 
languages analysed (French, Russian, Navajo and Mandarin Chinese) no such 
match was established. The author concludes that 'this makes it almost 
impossible for us, non-native speakers of English, to believe that the 
universal system is so strikingly identifiable with English' (p.29).

Santos' own working definition of tense and aspect specifies that 'tense 
is information having to do with order, position in a time line [...]' 
(p.39), while 'aspect is concerned with the temporal shape of an event or 
situation, how it distributes in time' (ibid.). Since it is arguable 
whether or not they are entities of the real world, for the analysis of a 
natural language they are to be taken as properties of the linguistic 
system, quite prominent to the way the Indo-European languages work. 

The author adopts Vendler's methodology (1967), rather than categories, 
looking for 'clear grammatical contrasts that distinguish predicates in a 
language' (p. 41). Following this theoretical and methodological 
framework, there are three main aspectual classes to be distinguished in 
Portuguese: qualidades, estados and events. Qualidades, or properties, are 
to be referred to as permanent states, while estados as temporary states. 
Events occur in time, and are always determined by a definite and unique 
temporal and spatial location. They, therefore, have temporal 
identification criteria, meaning that 'the same participants in the same 
place at a different time instantiate a different event' (p. 43). In case 
on English, the author differentiates between two major aspectual classes -
- events and states, and subcategorises events further into activities, 
accomplishments and achievements. 

In Chapter 4 the author presents a model developed for the description of 
translation, termed the translation network. She maintains that the two 
languages should be described 'on their own terms' (p. 69) and not on the 
basis of a priori determined categories. Translation, according to the 
author, should be seen 'as establishing a mapping from the categories 
specific to the source language into the categories of the target language 
[...]. Metaphorically speaking, translation is like viewing a source text 
with target language eyes' (p. 69). The translation network model 
exemplifies the various situations instigated by two main possibilities -- 
namely, compared to what a source language native speakers sees, a 
translator can see either more or less. The following situations are then 
presented: coercion brought about by translation, addition of 
interpretations triggered by translation, creation of vagueness by 
translation, preservation of vagueness in translation, choice of the wrong 
alternative in translation, choice of part of a compact meaning by 
translation. It is concluded that 'a model of translation must 
accommodate "noise", i.e., explain both mistranslation and translationese' 
(p. 99). 

In Chapter 5 the author presents in more detail the results of the 
contrastive analysis of the observed grammatical feature of the two 
languages. Since the analysis performed is corpus-based, further 
quantitative particulars about the corpus itself are given and the text 
processing explained. It consisted of two books and their translation into 
the other language. The text processing included three main tasks: 
scanning and subsequent proof-reading, sentence separation and sentence 
alignment.

The results of the analysis are presented in the form of a contrastive 
rule listing all the occurrences of the observed grammatical structures 
found in the corpus. More precisely, translation equivalents of Portuguese 
Imperfeito, conveying a bundle of meaning such as habituality, graduality, 
extendedness, marking of perspective, stativity, plurality, etc, have been 
rendered into English using a variety of structures/forms, e.g. Simple 
Past, Past Progressive, Gerund, Conditional, Passive, Pluperfect, 
Infinitive, etc. The frequency tables also revealed that the most common 
translation equivalent of the Portuguese Imperfeito was the English 
Pluperfect. The Portuguese Mais que Perfeito, on the other hand, rendered 
into the English Pluperfect only in 68% of the cases, and other 
translation equivalents included instances of Past Simple, Passive, 
Present Perfect, etc. Looking at the opposite translation direction, the 
author reports that The English Present Perfect was found to be rendered 
into Perfeito, Presente, Preterito Perfeito Composto, Imperfeito, Presente 
Conjuntivo, Mas que Perfeito, etc. Finally, the English Pluferfect was 
reported to render the following: Mas que Perfeito, Imperfeito, Perfeito, 
Mas que Perfeito Conjuntivo, Mas que Perfeito Condicional, Passiva (ser) 
and Mas que Perfeito Progressivo. It was also noticed that 'a change of 
aspectual class in the translation (with the consequent temporal change) 
was confirmed to be very common. Sometimes, the translation would subtly 
change the meaning [...], but it generally yielded a more idiomatic 
translation [...]' (p. 123-4). All standpoints are illustrated with 
appropriate examples.

Finally, Chapter 6 concludes the volume by suggesting possible further 
applications of the results obtained to other study fields, primarily to 
language engineering, corpus linguistics, translation studies and language 
pedagogy. The question of the (non)existence of the state of the art 
parallel text corpora and the problem of validation of contrastive corpus 
studies are also raised. The author pleads for the creation of a publicly 
available parallel corpus with a translation browser, revealing 
that 'vagueness is the most relevant property of a natural language, and 
only with its help can we understand language' (p. 161).

EVALUATION

'Tense and aspect in English and Portuguese: a contrastive semantic study' 
is an authoritative volume that will be warmly welcomed by a range or 
specialists, including contrastivists, corpus linguists, translators and 
educationalists. The author bravely challenges some widely accepted 
attitudes to language and linguistics that were predominant for the most 
part of the 20th century and, by introducing an innovative theoretical and 
methodological framework, gives an insightful analysis that has brought to 
light contrastively very valuable results. 

More specifically, the author draws attention to the question of 
translation equivalence that, despite being a key term of the contrastive 
analytical process, is left outside the focus of the theoretical apparatus 
of contrastive studies, remaining for decades a research interest of 
translatologists primarily. The translation network model that is 
introduced brings the much-needed contrastive analytical point of view in 
the understanding of the issue, serving at the same time as a pointer to 
the future research and theoretical development of contrastive analysis. 

Furthermore, Santos' research project persuasively shows how and why 
modern contrastive analysis should essentially be 'looking at the source 
language with target language eyes'(p.16), i.e. study actual real language 
material by analysing parallel text corpora. By taking a more holistic 
analytical approach the contrastivist will be able to get a much more 
refined results revealing similarities and differences between the 
contrasted languages that would otherwise remain unnoticed. 

The author deserves to be sincerely congratulated on bringing to light 
this well-organized and clearly written monograph. Her innovative ideas, 
redefinition of some theoretical concepts and analytical procedures will 
no doubt be deployed in future contrastive studies, confirming again the 
actual contribution this volume brought to our understanding of the issues 
examined.   

REFERENCES

Baker, Mona 1996. "Corpus-based translation studies: the challenges that 
lie ahead". In Harold Somers (ed), Terminology, LSP and translation: 
studies in language engineering in honour of Juan C. Sager, John 
Benjamins, Amsterdam and Philadelphia, 175-186.

Engh, Jan 1998. "Normer, grammatikk og databehandling". In Ruth Vatvedt 
Fjeld & Boye Wangensteen (eds), Normer og Regler: festskrift til Dag 
Gundersten, 15. januar 1998, Universitetsforlaget, Oslo, 344-359.

Jakoson, Roman 1959. "On linguistic aspects of translation". In Reuben A. 
Brower (ed), On translation, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass, 
232-239.

Nagao, Makoto 1988. "Language engineering: the real bottle neck of natural 
language processing". In Proceedings of COLING'88 (Budapest, 22-27 August 
1988), 448-453.

Santos, Diana 1996. Tense and aspect in English and Portuguese: a 
contrastive semantic study, PhD thesis, Instituto Superior Tecnico, June 
1996.

Smith, Carlota 1991. The parameter of aspect, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 
Dordrecht.

Tobin, Yishai 1993. Aspect in the English verb: process and result in 
language. Longman, London & New York.

Vendler, Zeno 1967. Linguistics in philosophy, Cornell University Press, 
Ithaca.

Vinay, J-P and J Darbelnet 1977 [1958]. Stylistique comparee du francais 
et de l'anglais: methode de traduction, Didier, Paris. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Svetlana Kurtes holds a BA in English Philology and an MA in 
Sociolinguistics from Belgrade University and an MPhil in Applied 
Linguistics from Cambridge University. She worked as a Lecturer in English 
at Belgrade University and is currently affiliated to Cambridge University 
Language Centre. Her research interests involve contrastive linguistics, 
sociolinguistics, pragmatics/stylistics, translation theory and language 
pedagogy.





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