25.4633, Review: Text/Corpus Ling; Translation: Kruger, Wallmach, Munday (2013)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-25-4633. Tue Nov 18 2014. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 25.4633, Review: Text/Corpus Ling; Translation: Kruger, Wallmach, Munday (2013)

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Date: Tue, 18 Nov 2014 16:15:59
From: Ulrike Stange [stangeu at uni-mainz.de]
Subject: Corpus-Based Translation Studies

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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/24/24-5230.html

EDITOR: Alet  Kruger
EDITOR: Kim  Wallmach
EDITOR: Jeremy  Munday
TITLE: Corpus-Based Translation Studies
SUBTITLE: Research and Applications
SERIES TITLE: Bloomsbury Advances in Translation
PUBLISHER: Bloomsbury Publishing (formerly The Continuum International Publishing Group)
YEAR: 2013

REVIEWER: Ulrike Stange, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz

Review's Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry

SUMMARY

This book is a collection of twelve papers by different authors. As the title
suggests, the common denominator of all contributions is a concern with the
relatively new branch of corpus-based translation studies, viz. research in
the field of translation (and interpreting) based on corpora of translation
(and interpreting) data collected on different occasions. In particular, the
work focuses on the past and potential benefits of corpus-based approaches in
investigating the “key questions of translation and interpreting” (1). This
volume is divided into three main parts, moving from concepts and tools to
methods to specific studies. The first part accounts for half of the book,
comprising five chapters. The second part is the shortest of all and includes
three papers. The final part contains the remaining four chapters. All papers
have an average length of 20 pages, with chapter 2 being the prominent
exception (40 pages). The individual chapters are briefly summarised below. 

Part I: Core Concepts and Tools

Chapter 1: “Corpus-Based Translation Studies: Where Does It Come From? Where
Is It Going?” by Sara Laviosa (13-32)

The first chapter explores the past, the present and the potential future of
corpus-based studies in descriptive and applied translation studies. The
author stresses the effect that the use of corpora had for a variety of
linguistic disciplines and identifies the strong links established between
corpus linguistics (CL) and Descriptive Translation Studies (DTS) in the early
1990s as “the key to the success story” of Corpus-Based Translation Studies
(CTS) (14). Laviosa also briefly sketches a number of related studies,
including their major findings and the implications they have for a variety of
theoretical approaches. Discussing the important issue of corpora and
representativeness, the author comes to the conclusion that “there is always a
trade-off between balance and comparability, on the one hand, and
representativeness on the other” (19). The paper also offers a brief survey of
corpus-based cross-linguistic and cross-cultural research, again sketching
relevant studies and their findings. 

Chapter 2: “Corpus-Based Interpreting Studies (CIS): Overview and Prospects”
by Robin Setton (33-75)

Chapter 2 outlines the history of corpus-based interpreting studies (CIS) and
is rather long in comparison to the other chapters. The author briefly
contrasts CL, DTS and CIS and discusses the additional benefits that
interpreting corpora (the data consist of recordings and/or transcriptions of
interpretations) might have -- such as “test[ing] the predictions of cognitive
and pragmatic models of speech communication” (35). The chapter includes a
short overview of the different types of interpreting, highlighting their
particularities and the challenges interpreters face in terms of cognitive and
linguistic demands in the different interpreting situations. Setton lists the
corpus-based interpreting studies that have been conducted so far, providing
details on languages considered, corpora size, availability of transcriptions,
foci of analysis, etc. These studies are only commented upon selectively,
however, and details pertaining to results are very scarce. The author also
discusses the problems of collecting, encoding and analysing interpreting
data, problems that are further complicated by the fact that CIS also need to
consider the dimensions of orality, multilingualism and synchronicity. Another
issue pertaining to CSI corpora involves the question of how to transcribe the
data (priority given to details or readability) and which features to include
in the tagging procedure. Evidently, the type of features a researcher will
want to tag depends on the research question. Ideally, plenty of details are
provided in the transcript to be shown or hidden as needed using software
tools. Compiling CSI corpora is still difficult and very time-consuming,
however, because of the limitations of automatic transcription, alignment and
segmentation software. Setton suggests encoding all CSI data such that it
includes (1) digitized audio and or video tracks, (2) plain (orthographic)
transcription, (3) fine-grained time-coding, (4) prosodic profile, and (5)
syntactic profile (61). Regarding data analysis, it is essential that
contemporary research norms be met and that researchers conduct both
qualitative and quantitative analyses. CSI corpora encoded as suggested can
then be used to “tease out the most elusive aspects of interpreting” (66),
provided hypothesis-testing and data analysis are carried out within a sound
theoretical framework. In his conclusion, the author stresses that CSI offers
the benefit of gaining further insight into interpreting despite the
challenges that encoding and analysing CSI data pose. 

Chapter 3: “Translation Units and Corpora” by Dorothy Kenny (76-102)

After considering various approaches to translation units in turn (including
comparative stylistics, process- and product-oriented translation studies and
natural language processing), this chapter explores the potential insights to
be gained by studying translation units in CTS corpora.  To date, this
phenomenon has attracted little attention within CTS. Kenny views translation
units as “mutually defining source/target text segments” (87), which is the
view also adopted in product-oriented studies. These units are identified by
manual search in one text first, then looking at the ST and TT in turn in the
process of analysing the data. Toury’s ‘no leftovers’ method is adopted and
changed slightly to isolate problem/solution pairs. The key question is
whether extended units of meaning (in the sense of phrases) coincide with
translation units. Using GEPCOLT, the author shows that the translation of
German “mit aller Kraft/Gewalt/Macht/Wucht” requires knowledge of the agent of
the action in question because it is this piece of information that must be
made explicit in the English version (e.g. “as hard as THEY could”). The
second example they quote using data from the German-English Parallel  Corpus
of Literary Texts (GEPCOLT) is that of “mit weit aufgerissenen Augen”. Showing
through English translations of the ST that “weit” is partly delexicalised,
the author argues that parallel corpora can be used to identify “instances of
delexicalisation in the source language” (97).  

Chapter 4: “Hardwiring Corpus-Based Translation Studies: Corpus Encoding” by
Frederico Zanettin (103-123)

After a brief introduction on corpora in general this chapter discusses three
issues: (1) why DTS corpora need encoding, (2) what should be encoded, and (3)
how the data should be encoded. As regards the question of how to encode data
the adoption of a standard is desirable for obvious reasons. Zanettin suggests
an XML (eXtensible Markup Language)/TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) encoding
framework because it aids in the construction of “stable, flexible and
accessible corpus resources for translation research and for corpus-based
descriptive translation studies in particular” (110). The author briefly
explains the characteristics of XML, a text-based annotation system, which is
compatible with TEI documents. He provides the very basics of XML/TEI,
stressing its advantages for compiling CTS corpora.  Zanettin goes into more
detail regarding encoding in the discussion of the CEXI (Centralised External
Input) project (which aimed at compiling a parallel bilingual and
bidirectional English-Italian corpus) and provides examples of how the XML/TEI
texts may be used in corpus research. 

Chapter 5: “Web-Based Corpus Software” by Saturnino Luz (124-149)

Luz provides an overview of recent developments in tools, technologies and
standards that could contribute to “an infrastructure for creating and sharing
distributed, dynamic and widely accessible corpora” (125). In this line, the
chapter offers an introductory description of mark-up languages (XML, DTD,
CSS), indexing techniques and client-server architecture. These technologies
were used for text storage and retrieval in the Translational English Corpus
(TEC) project, and the author offers a tutorial introduction to the TEC
browser. The chapter includes a presentation of what web-based corpus software
could look like, pinpointing problems and challenges involved in a range of
scenarios. 

Part II: Methods for the Qualitative Analysis of Contrastive Patterns in Large
Corpora

Chapter 6: “Lexical Priming and Translation” by Michael Hoey (155-168)

Hoey discusses the notion of lexical priming, showing that the traditional
distinction between lexis and grammar is rather problematic when it comes to
collocations. He argues that the acquisition of a lexical item is the result
of priming and that the lexical item “in turn becomes primed for collocation,
grammatical category, semantic association, colligation and textual
colligation” (157). The author shows that even cognates might be primed
differently, thus potentially becoming “a new class of false friends” (158). A
lexical comparison of an English ST and a Portuguese TT suggests “subtle
shifts of colligation, semantic association and textual colligation” (164), a
finding which needs to be considered in terms of possible impact on
translations. Three options then arise for the translation of the TT: (1) keep
the source language priming, thus rendering the TT more alien, (2) import the
priming of the target language, making the TT sound more natural, and (3) a
mixture of both.   

Chapter 7: “Looming Large: A Cross-Linguistic Analysis of Semantic Prosodies
in Comparable Reference Corpora” by Jeremy Munday (169-186)

After introducing the concept of semantic prosody, Munday’s paper discusses
its implications for translations. Translators might not be aware of
differences in semantic prosody and thus cause semantic prosody shifts in the
translations. These in turn could affect how the reader responds to a given
text. A study of LOOM LARGE and Spanish CERNERSE revealed that the two lexical
items both have generally negative semantic prosodies but differ in their
collocates and the syntactic structures in which they occur. Importantly,
semantic prosody of certain lexical items may be genre-specific. Combining
quantitative and qualitative analyses of semantic prosody and colligation
patterns will prove beneficial for a better understanding of the translation
process. 

Chapter 8: “Using Translation and Parallel Text Corpora to Investigate the
Influence of Global English on Textual Norms in Other Languages” by Juliane
House (187-208)

Drawing on the notions of overt and covert translation, House investigates
whether English is so influential these days that covert translations are
discontinued in German target texts. She presents the Hamburg ‘Covert
Translation’ project, identifying working hypotheses, outlining the features
of the corpus and the methodology applied. Although the findings did not
confirm that covert translations are discontinued due to English influence,
translations into German seem to change with respect to  the interpersonal
function in popular science and economic texts. Based on these findings, House
studied the domain of subjectivity using corpus data. She considered a range
of interacting phenomena, including modality (in particular modal verbs and
modal particles), speaker-hearer deixis, sentence adverbials and composite
deictics. The results failed to support the hypothesis that the interpersonal
function in German texts gained more weight through English influence in the
translation process, but three explanatory models are offered to account for
these findings. 

Part III: Studies in Specific Sub-Fields

Chapter 9: “Off the Record and On the Fly: Examining the Impact of Corpora on
Terminographic Practice in the Context of Translation” by Lynne Bowker
(211-236)

This chapter evaluates the significance of corpus-based research and tools for
terminological research and for terminographic practices as carried out by
terminologists and translators. It outlines the discipline of terminology and
considers how technology has been integrated into this field, especially with
regard to the creation of term banks. Importantly, in their creation of term
banks terminologists fail to “pass the benefits of their corpus-based research
on to the translators in any appreciable form” (215) by limiting the amount of
information that is available for a given lexical item. Bower contrasts how
terminologists and translators engage in thematic research, differences which
are motivated by diverging professional needs. The author presents the
integrated tool suites translation memory systems and term extractors,
pinpointing both their advantages and their shortcomings. All in all,
translators have seemingly changed how they work with term banks. They do not
trust them blindly anymore but consult both term banks and corpora to achieve
optimum results, especially considering that the information contained in term
banks tends to date more quickly these days. Accordingly, the author suggests
that terminology courses for translators be adapted to match their
professional needs and provides a detailed description of what this modified
curriculum could look like. 

Chapter 10: “Style of Translation: The Use of Foreign Words in Translations by
Margaret Jull Costa and Peter Bush” by Gabriela Saldanha (237-258)

Using target texts by two different translators, Saldanha shows and discusses
how the translators may leave their individual stylistic footprints in English
translations from Spanish and Portuguese. The author defines the notion of
translator style and presents the two corpora used for the present study. She
investigates how Jull Costa and Bush treat both highlighted and
non-highlighted source culture lexical items in their English translations.
The individual strategies and preferences thus identified are matched against
a third, comparative corpus to test whether they are indeed instances of
translator style. Saldanha also explores the communicative function of source
culture items in translation, distinguishing between cases of
self-referentiality and culture-specific items. Again, Jull Costa and Bush
display different strategies in their translation, which are discussed in an
interview with the two translators. Factors accounting for the differences in
translator style include how the two translators conceptualise both their
readership and their role as intercultural mediators.    

Chapter 11: “A Link between Simplification and Explicitation in English-Xhosa
Parallel Texts: Do the Morphological Complexities of Xhosa Have an Influence?”
by Koliswa Moropa (259-281)

This paper is one of the first attempts to apply corpus-based translation
studies to an African language, in this case Xhosa. In the absence of an
acceptable standard in translation, parallel corpora have come into use to aid
standardisation of terminology. Since Xhosa is an agglutinating language with
a concordial system, its translation into English poses a number of
challenges. The strategies usually involved in translating Xhosa into English
are simplification (of syntax, style and lexis) and explicitation (insertion
of explicit demonstratives, use of lexical repetition, and adding explanatory
information), which are explained in detail.  

Chapter 12: “Disfluencies in Simultaneous Interpreting: A Corpus-Based
Analysis” by Claudio Bendalozzi, Annalisa Sandrelli and Mariachiara Russo
(282-306)

The final chapter analyses two types of disfluencies in simultaneous
interpreting, viz. mispronounced words and truncated (unfinished) words. The
data used for analysis of these features were the European Parliament
Interpreting Corpus (EPIC), and both the source and the target language
speakers were subject to investigation. The languages considered were English,
Spanish and Italian, both as source and as target languages. The theoretical
background provided comprises a general description of disfluencies and spoken
language production, zooms in on language production and disfluencies in
simultaneous interpreting, and introduces operational definitions of
mispronounced and truncated words to be applied in the present study. The
practical part presents the methodology used and discusses the results, taking
into consideration not only performance-specific differences (original text
vs. interpretation) but also language-specific ones (Germanic vs. Romance,
Romance vs. Romance).  For instance, it was found that mispronounced and
truncated words were more frequent in the TTs than in their STs, and that
interpreters produced fewer disfluencies when working from Spanish or Italian
into English than when working between the two Romance languages. 

EVALUATION

In their introduction the editors announce that the book focuses mainly on the
benefits of corpus-based studies “in the investigation of key questions of
translation and interpreting” (1). Without exception, all the contributions
have highlighted the advantages of working with corpora in translation
studies, referencing relevant studies. Shortcomings and challenges were also
discussed and potential solutions offered.   

This book will be of interest to anyone concerned with translation studies,
especially those still reluctant to consider corpus-based approaches. This
volume convincingly and repeatedly shows how beneficial corpus-based studies
are in this discipline. For those already in favour of applying this method,
it offers stimulating input regarding the range of research possibilities that
are opened up by corpus-based studies. All in all, this volume is also highly
accessible to non-specialists and very interesting to read.

Unfortunately, the volume does not cohere fully. Its title “Corpus-Based
Translation Studies. Research and Applications” suggests that it solely
addresses CTS, presenting a number of relevant studies. In fact, it includes
two chapters (2 and 12) on CIS, with one of them even being a prominent part
of the book because of its length (chapter 2). Another two chapters (1 and 3)
are theory-oriented. Furthermore, the collection of papers for the first part
entitled “Core Concepts and Tools” has a somewhat random feel to it. Chapter 1
presents an overview of the present, past and potential future of CTS, chapter
2 covers CIS, chapter 3 discusses the concept of translation units, and
chapters 4 and 5 then introduce the reader to the basics of programming
languages and related tools. Incidentally, I found these two chapters a bit
problematic in that they are too technical and complex for novices but offer
too little information for those already at least slightly familiar with XML,
DTD and CSS. However, helpful references for further reading are provided.
Thus, chapters 4 and 5 allow the readers to form an idea of the benefits of
the XML encoding framework (also in combination with TEI, DTD and CSS), but in
order to produce XML texts themselves, they will have to do a lot more reading
and spend a considerable amount of time to learn the programming language. 

Part II, which consisted of three papers, was coherent in that all the papers
presented methods for the qualitative analysis of contrastive patterns (in
this case pragmatic and discourse features) in large corpora. Part III
presented studies in specific subfields, such as terminology studies,
stylistics, translation universals and simultaneous interpreting, so naturally
but excusably it read like a mix of papers lined up. Again, the chapter on
interpreting stuck out because I would not have expected it to be part of the
volume. 

All in all, although the titles of the parts fit in with the chapters they
contain, it is the content of the individual papers that leaves the impression
of the parts and the volume as such not being fully coherent. This impression
was not attenuated even though the introduction did include a brief
description of the individual chapters, attempting to make the connections
between them. Nonetheless, all of the contributions are of a very high quality
and offer stimulating input, not least because they point to new avenues of
research, both empirically and theoretically, and or in terms of combining
different disciplines or methods.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Ulrike Stange holds an M.A. in English Linguistics and is a research assistant
at the Department of English and Linguistics at Mainz University in Germany.
Her research interests include emotive interjections (PhD thesis to be
published soon), translation studies and dialectal variation in British
English.








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