scholarly journals Crossed transposition in a corpus-based study of motion in English and Spanish

2017 ◽  
Vol 18 (2) ◽  
pp. 207-229
Author(s):  
Belén Labrador

Abstract The present paper reports on a translation-based teaching-oriented study of the expression of path and manner of motion (Talmy 1972) in English and Spanish. The aim is to explore contrastive differences by analysing translations, with special attention to crossed transposition (Molina and Hurtado Albir 2002), which implies a double shift of part-of-speech from the source text to the target text, and is the expected type of transfer between a satellite-framed language like English and a verb-framed language like Spanish. Two corpora have been used, a monolingual corpus of Children’s Short Stories, the CSS-corpus, and a parallel corpus English-Spanish, P-ACTRES 2.0. The results show a high tendency for implicitation of either path or manner and for compression in the translations into Spanish, whereas crossed transposition is preferred in the translations into English. Also, some pedagogical applications are suggested for including these motion expressions in TEFL to young learners through storytelling.

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
pp. 532-552 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Cristina Mendes

The process of screen adaptation is an act of ventriloquism insofar as it gives voice to contemporary anxieties and desires through its trans-temporal use of a source text. Screen adaptations that propose to negotiate meanings about the past, particularly a conflicted past, are acts of ‘trans-temporal ventriloquism’: they adapt and reinscribe pre-existing source texts to animate contemporary concerns and anxieties. I focus on the acts of trans-temporal ventriloquism in Ian Iqbal Rashid's Surviving Sabu (1998), a postcolonial, turn-of-the-twenty-first century short film that adapts Zoltan and Alexander Korda's film The Jungle Book (1942), itself an adaptation of Rudyard Kipling's collection of short stories by the same name. Surviving Sabu is about the survival and appropriation of orientalist films as a means of self-expression in a postcolonial present. Inherent in this is the idea of cinema as a potentially redemptive force that can help to balance global power inequalities. Surviving Sabu's return to The Jungle Book becomes a means both of tracing the genealogy of specific orientalist discourses and for ventriloquising contemporary concerns. This article demonstrates how trans-temporal ventriloquism becomes a strategy of political intervention that enables the film-maker to take ownership over existing media and narratives. My argument examines Surviving Sabu as an exemplar of cultural studies of the 1980s and 1990s: a postcolonial remediation built on fantasy and desire, used as a strategy of writing within rather than back to empire.


Target ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 288-309 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mario Bisiada

Abstract Most corpus-based studies of translation use published texts as the basis for their corpus. This overlooks interventions by other agents involved in translation such as editors, who may have significant influence on the translated text. In order to study editors’ influence on the translation product, this paper presents a comparative analysis of manuscript and published translations, which allows a differentiation of actual translated language and edited translated language. Based on a tripartite parallel corpus of English business articles and their translations into German, I analyse translators’ and editors’ influence on grammatical metaphoricity of the text, specifically on the use of nominalisations. One finding is that a significant amount of nominalisation is re-verbalised by editors. The results show that translated language may often be the result of significant editorial intervention. Thus, by just considering source text and published translation, our picture of what translators actually do may be significantly distorted.


2017 ◽  
pp. 35-46 ◽  
Author(s):  
Irene Doval

This paper reviews the author’s experiences of tokenizing and POS tagging a bilingual parallel corpus, the PaGeS Corpus, consisting mostly of German and Spanish fictional texts. This is part of an ongoing process of annotating the corpus for part-of-speech information. This study discusses the specific problems encountered so far. On the one hand, tagging performance degrades significantly when applied to fictional data and, on the other, pre-existing annotation schemes are all language specific. To further improve accuracy during post-editing, the author has developed a common tagset and identified major error patterns.


2020 ◽  
Vol 20 ◽  
Author(s):  
Magdalena Ślawska

The Domestication of Cultural Strangeness in the Translation of Children's Literature: The case of Dubravka Ugrešić's Kućni duhovi [Home Ghosts]This article is devoted to the Polish translation of Kućni duhovi [Home Ghosts], a collection of short stories by Dubravka Ugrešić, her only book addressed to the youngest readers which has been published outside Croatia. The study focuses on the issue of cultural strangeness generated mostly by proper names that appear in the stories: ghosts' names, and the names and surnames of other characters. In her translation, Dorota Jovanka Ćirlić domesticated the source text, replacing all of them with Polish equivalents. The comparative analysis presented in this article considers translation strategies she used and illustrates them with numerous examples. Oswajanie obcości kulturowej w przekładzie literatury dziecięcej. Przypadek Domowych duchów Dubravki UgrešićNiniejszy artykuł poświęcony jest przekładowi na język polski zbioru opowiadań Dubravki Ugrešić pt. Domowe duchy. Jest to jedyna książka pisarki adresowana do najmłodszych czytelników, która ukazała się poza granicami Chorwacji. Szczególna uwaga skierowana została na kwestię obcości kulturowej, którą w książce Ugrešić generują przede wszystkim nazwy własne (nazwy duchów, imiona i nazwiska pozostałych bohaterów). Dorota Jovanka Ćirlić, autorka przekładu, dokonała udomowienia tekstu źródłowego, zastępując wszystkie nazwy własne, pojawiające się w oryginale, polskimi ekwiwalentami. Zastosowane przez tłumaczkę strategie translatorskie zostały omówione oraz zilustrowane licznymi przykładami w toku analizy porównawczej.


2018 ◽  
Vol 91 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Korakoch Attaviriyanupap

Although German and Thai are typologically different from each other, both languages do have copulative constructions. The verb sein is the most important copular verb in German. Thai does have literary equivalents for this German verb but they involve different verbs. However, only pen and khɯ: are usually considered as Thai copular verbs. This study aims to compare the German verb sein in copulative constructions with pen and khɯ:. The contrastive analysis is based on a bidirectional parallel corpus consisting of 12 Thai and 13 German contemporary short stories and their translation into the other language. Three questions are to be answered: 1) Which forms are found in Thai as equivalents to the German copular verb sein? 2) Which linguistic elements in German occur as equivalents of the Thai copulative constructions with pen and khɯ:? 3) How can the use of copular verbs in German and in Thai be described? The results of this study show that the equivalents of the German copulative constructions with sein are not only pen and khɯ: but also many other constructions. At the same time, the Thai copular verbs are often used differently and may be expressed in various German constructions and, especially in form of punctuations.


Author(s):  
A. A. Goncharov ◽  
◽  
O. Yu. Inkova ◽  
◽  

One of the main characteristics of logical-semantic relations (LSRs) between two fragments of a text is that these relations can be either explicit (expressed by some marker, e.g. a connective) or implicit (derived from the interrelation of these fragments’ semantics). Since implicit LSRs do not have any marker, it is difficult to find them in a text (whether automatically or not). In this paper, approaches to analysing implicit LSRs are compared, an original definition for them is offered and differences between implicit LSRs and LSRs expressed by non-prototypical means are described. A method is proposed to identify implicit LSRs using a parallel corpus and a supracorpora database of connectives. Based on the well-known statement that LSRs can be explicitated by adding connectives in the translation, it is argued here that through selecting pairs in which fragments where a connective is used to express an LSR in the translation correspond to those containing any of the translation stimuli standard for this connective in the source language, it is possible to get an array of contexts in which this LSR is implicit in the source text (or expressed by means other than connectives). This method is then applied to study the French causal connectives car, parce que and puisque using a Russian-French parallel corpus. The corpus data are analysed to obtain information about LSRs particularly about cases where the causal LSR in Russian is implicit, as well as about the use of causal connectives in French. These results are used to show that the method proposed allows to quickly create a representative array of contexts with implicit LSRs, which can be useful in both text analysis and in machine learning.


2020 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. 107-136
Author(s):  
Hanem El-Farahaty ◽  
Abdelhamid Elewa

It is argued that legal language should be formal, precise and clear to avoid ambiguity and/or misunderstanding. As rights and duties are communicated through modals, clarity and precision in drafting and translating them is crucial. Otherwise, there is a possibility of conveying loose messages in the source text or different and/or inconsistent messages in the target text. However, the drafting of Arabic modal expressions does not follow clear guidelines, and their translation differs from one translator to another.  This paper investigates how deontic modality of obligation and prohibition is used in The Leeds Annotated Parallel Corpus of Arabic-English Constitutions in comparison to The Leeds Monolingual Corpus of English Constitutions. More specifically, the paper presents a classification of these modal expressions and investigates the different lexical variants expressed in a Corpus of Arabic Constitutions. The paper uses corpus-based tools to analyse the different lexical forms used for deontic modality of obligation and prohibition in Arabic and how they are rendered into English. Results of such analysis are compared to a non-translated Corpus of English Constitutions to find out whether the deontic meaning of the modals is comparable to the set of deontic modals used in the constitutions originally drafted in English. The corpus-based analysis gave a detailed classification of a variety of modal expressions used in the Arabic Corpus. It also showed that the translation of deontic modals of obligation and prohibition from Arabic into English is influenced by the source text lexical variations; however, the corpus techniques employed in the study managed to capture some comparable modals in both corpora.


2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
Belén Labrador de la Cruz

This study explores the different uses of the word little, its equivalents in Spanish and its teaching to young Spanish learners. First, it aims at analyzing the lexico-grammatical behavior of little in a corpus of children’s short stories, where its prevailing use, preceding countable nouns, has been found to be much more frequent than in other domains and registers. A contrastive study follows, which examines how little has been translated in an English-Spanish parallel corpus; the results show that diminutives constitute an important equivalent. Finally, some didactic implications are proposed, with the application of corpus-based findings to the teaching of English to young Spanish learners from an approach that combines lexical syllabi and story-based methodologies.


2007 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 119-141 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ingrid Lossius Falkum

This paper studies the lexical-pragmatic processes of narrowing and broadening of conceptual content in the relation between original texts and their corresponding translations in the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus (ENPC) from a relevance-theoretic point of view. It is suggested that, in at least some cases, translations can be seen as a kind of mirror reflecting the pragmatic processes at work in lexical interpretation. A translator may choose to render an underspecified concept encoded in a source text by a word that more closely encodes the interpretation given to the concept in question, in which case the semantics/pragmatics distinction (as it applies to the source text) will be made explicit in the relation between source and target text. In other cases, the comparison of source and target text shows that similar lexical encodings in the two languages do not necessarily provide the same possibilities for lexical broadening.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mashael ALMUTAIRI ◽  
Nouf AL KOUS ◽  
Mimouna ZITOUNI

Investigating translation shifts in the translation of news articles has not received much attention despite its paramount importance in how translators produce adequate translations. Indeed, news translation is considered to be understudied in the field of translation. The current research aims at identifying the types of category shifts that have occurred and the most employed ones in the selected corpus.This study offers also an understanding of the category shifts that occur concerning translating news reports or stories. Accordingly, the study will explore the translation of a news article from English into Arabic; the news article titled 'North Korea 'preparing rocket launch', images suggest' is published on BBC news website 9 March 2019 together with its translation which was found on the BBC Arabic news website. To attain the research objectives, a comparative investigation of the English source text and the Arabic target text will be needed to look into the use of category shifts following Catford's typology of category shifts. This study adopted a qualitative and quantitative method in identifying what kinds of category shifts occurred and the most frequent ones in the analyzed news text. The findings show that all types of category shifts were employed in the translation with a total of 35 shifts. The most employed type of category shift is structural shifts which are exemplified through 16 cases. These structural shifts are illustrated in word-order, passive-active, or nominal-verbal sentence structures. The least applied category shifts in the process of translation are class shifts which indicate that the translator found target text equivalences that have the same part of speech of the source text items. The study concludes that category shifts were employed in the translation to fill the linguistic gap between the two languages.


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