Federico Zanettin

Translation-Driven Corpora : Corpus Resources for Descriptive and Applied Translation Studies

1. Introduction 1.1 Book outline 1.2 How to use the DVD 2. Corpus linguistics and translation studies 2.1 A typology of translation-driven corpora 2.2 Corpus-based translation research 2.2.1 Regularities of translations 2.2.1.1 Simplification 2.2.1.2 Explicitation 2.2.1.3 Standardization 2.2.1.4 Translation of unique items 2.2.1.5 Untypical collocations 2.2.1.6 Interference 2.2.2 Regularities of translators 2.2.3 Regularities of languages 2.2.4 Learner translation corpora 2.2.5 Interpreting and multimodal corpora 2.3 Corpus-based translation teaching and learning 2.4 Computer-assisted translation and computational linguistics 2.5 Tasks 2.5.1 Experimenting with the TEC 2.5.2 Experimenting with COMPARA 2.5.3 Experimenting with the LTC 2.6 Further reading 3. Corpus design and acquisition 3.1 Corpus design 3.1.1 Size 3.1.2 Composition 3.1.3 Representativeness and comparability 3.1.4 Case study: the CEXI corpus 3.2 Corpus acquisition and copyright 3.3 Web corpora 3.3.1 The Web as corpus 3.3.2 The Web as a source of corpora 3.3.2.1 General Web corpora 3.3.2.2 Specialized Web corpora 3.4 Conclusions 3.5 Tasks 3.5.1 Corpus building project outline 3.5.2 Manual creation of a DIY monolingual corpus 3.5.3 Automatic creation of a DIY bilingual comparable corpus 3.6 Further reading 4. Corpus encoding and annotation 4.1 Corpus-based translation studies and corpus annotation 4.2 Annotation for descriptive translation studies 4.2.1 Documentary information 4.2.2 Structural information 4.2.3 Text-linguistic information 4.3 Stand-off annotation 4.4 Conclusions 4.5 Tasks 4.5.1 Creating an XML TEI document 4.5.2 Adding a simple header 4.5.3 Marking-up text structure 4.5.4 Adding linguistic annotation 4.5.5 Indexing the corpus 4.5.6 Searching the corpus 4.6 Further reading 5. Corpus tools and corpus analysis 5.1 Corpus creation and analysis tools 5.1.1 Text acquisition 5.1.2 Annotation 5.1.3 Corpus management and query systems 5.1.4 Data retrieval and display 5.2 Analysis of corpus data 5.2.1 Wordlists and basic statistics 5.2.2 Concordances 5.2.3 Collocations, clusters and clouds 5.2.4 Colligations and word profiles 5.2.5 Semantic associations 5.3 Conclusions 5.4 Tasks 5.4.1 Wordlists 5.4.2 Lists of lemmas 5.4.3 Keywords 5.4.4 Concordances 5.4.5 Collocations and clusters 5.4.6 Word profiles 5.5 Further reading and software 6. Creating multilingual corpora 6.1 Corpus acquisition 6.1.1 Comparable corpora 6.1.2 Parallel corpora 6.2 Alignment 6.2.1 Paragraphs and sentences 6.2.2 Approaches and tools 6.3 Case study: the OPUS corpus 6.4 Parallel corpora and translation memories 6.5 Alignment below sentence level 6.5.1 Alignment of comparable corpora 6.5.2 Word alignment 6.6 Tasks 6.6.1 Aligning a text pair 6.6.2 A parallel corpus of literary texts 6.6.3 Corpus creation checklist 6.7 Further reading and software 7. Using multilingual corpora 7.1 Comparable and parallel corpora 7.2 Display and analysis of parallel corpora 7.3 Case study: The Rushdie English-Italian parallel corpus 7.4 Case study: the OPUS Word alignment database 7.5 Multilingual corpora in translator training and practice 7.6 Tasks 7.6.1 Searching a parallel corpus of literary texts 7.6.2 Exploring the Europarl multilingual corpus 7.7 Further reading 8. Conclusions

Corpus-based Translation Activities for Language Learners

Abstract While a number of studies have dealt with the use of corpus linguistics resources in the education of translation trainees, and a large body of literature exists on the use of corpora for second language learning activities, the relevance of corpus-based translation activities in second language learning settings has been explored to a lesser extent. This paper argues that translation can be a legitimate type of activity for ESL learners and that integrating corpus resources into second-language writing and translating means supplementing the traditional learning grammar of “dictionary items + combinatory rules” with a novel learning grammar of “corpora + rules for querying and analyzing them”. Examples are presented from a course in English as a foreign language delivered to Italian postgraduate students of international relations. Students were asked to revise an MT translation of a short text from an academic or journalistic source related to international relations, and then write an essay explaining how they used corpora and corpus linguistics techniques to evaluate and revise the translation. Students’ performance varied both in terms of the final translation produced and in the way and degree to which they used corpus resources, and it appears that the students who mostly benefited from the course were those who were able to both formulate better hypotheses and linguistic queries, and to analyze the results of different corpus resources. While the course was aimed at language rather than translation learners, the results also have clear implications for the latter.

Sketching landscapes in translation studies: A bibliographic study

This paper investigates how subfields within translation studies have been defined and how research interests and foci have shifted over the years, using data from the Translation Studies Abstracts (TSA) online database. We draw on the notions of ‘landscape’ and ‘sketch maps’ in an attempt to reflect on the role that TSA editors, as well as writers of papers and abstracts, have had on the dynamics of the field. We start by offering an overview of the contents of the database, and reflect on how bibliographical tools ultimately represent partial views of a disciplinary landscape. We look at how different bibliographies devise categories for describing topics of research and thus create maps to navigate that landscape. However, maps are static devices, unable to represent how the landscape was shaped historically. Thus, we also use a TSA corpus to observe how classifications and the frequencies of keywords have changed at different points in time, while reflecting on how, as inhabitants of this landscape, editors of bibliographies affect the extent to which the data is both representative of and informed by the field, and as colonizers, they impose their order upon it.

Corpora in Translation

Corpus resources and tools have come to play an increasingly important role both in Translation Studies research and in translation practices. In Translation Studies, corpora have provided a basis for empirical descriptive research. Corpus-based studies usually involves the comparison of two (sub) corpora, in which translated texts are compared with either their source texts (parallel corpus) or with another (sub)corpus constructed according to similar design criteria (comparable corpus), either in the same or in another language. These corpora are used to investigate regularities of translated texts, regularities of translators and regularities of languages. Regularities of translation may consist either of universal features which are hypothesised to be distinctive of translated texts as opposed to non-translated texts, or of translation norms and strategies which characterise texts translated under specific social and historical circumstances. Regularities of translators are individual linguistic habits manifested through consistently different (unconscious) patterns of choices, independently of the source texts. Parallel corpora are used, together with bilingual or multilingual comparable corpora, to compare and contrast regularities of languages. Bilingual and multilingual corpora have also found application in translator education. Parallel corpora offer learners a repository of translators’ strategies and choices, while comparable corpora provide them with a mapping of the words and structures employed by different linguistic communities for building discourse.

‘The deadliest error’: translation, international relations and the news media

ABSTRACT This article discusses the role of translation in the making of international politics. While being largely invisible, translation and interpreting activities are interwoven with political communication, both in contexts of direct negotiations among the parties involved and when the media act as a mediating agent by recontextualising political statements and documents across languages and cultures. This article examines two such episodes at times of diplomatic crisis and war. The first concerns the statement made by the Japanese prime minister after the Potsdam ultimatum in 1945; the second concerns remarks by the Iranian president during the conference ‘A World without Zionism’ in 2005. After a discussion of the linguistic features of the source and translated statements, and of their interpretation and use, it is argued that the translation strategies adopted by the media contribute to actively shape international relations, and that translation activities deserve to be attentively taken into consideration by policy and opinion makers, as well as by the general public.

Translation, censorship and the development of European comics cultures

ABSTRACT This article provides an historical overview of the role played by translation and censorship in the development of national traditions of graphic storytelling in Europe. In the mid 1930s, comics industries witnessed a boom in countries like Italy, France and Spain, largely due to the influence of imported American comics. Other nations followed different routes. The UK, for instance, acted as an exporting country towards the rest of Europe but imported little foreign production, and the British comics industry reached a peak only in the 1950s. In Germany, a comics industry was not born until the 1950s, and a national tradition developed only much later. While the production of comics in all these countries was regulated at various points by official censorship, preventive self-censorship was applied independently of political color and form of government, and translated comics were often heavily manipulated to suppress verbal and visual representations of violence and sensuality, and to alter unwanted political and cultural references. National traditions were promoted by censorship against foreign products, and developed by incorporating the themes and visual language of American comics in original production, while the translation of comics was characterized by the norms regulating the translation of popular fiction more generally.

Manga in America. Transnational book publishing and the domestication of Japanese comics, by Casey Brienza, London, Bloomsbury, 2016, 232 pp., £21.99 (paperback), ISBN 978-1-472-59587-4

This volume, which is presented in the back cover blurb as the first book-length study of ‘the American manga publishing industry’ (where America means the US and Canada), is a sociological investi...