Łukasz Grabowski

European Security Under Threat: Mediating the Crisis and Constructing the Other

Abstract Departing from the assumption that discourse is both socially constituted and constitutive, and that social reality is co-constructed by the institutions of mass communication, this chapter takes under scrutiny media representation of the recent refugee crisis in Europe. The objective behind it is to maximise the validity of the Media Proximization Approach (MPA), drawing on the insights from Critical Discourse Studies, cognitive linguistics and corpus linguistics, in explicating how the media can potentially impact on the salience of issues and thus on public perception of problems and threats along with measures to be taken to deal with them. Examining the data from Poland, a European Union member state from Central Europe, criticised for its anti-refugee stance and refusal to accept the assigned quotas of migrants, and, importantly, the country ‘experiencing’ migrant crisis without refugees, we look at the role of word co-occurrence patterns in the discursive representation of refugees and immigrants in Rzeczpospolita daily and Niezalezna.pl, the Polish right-wing press. The analysis, of both quantitative and qualitative nature, focuses on lexical associations of two nouns, uchodźca ‘refugee’ and imigrant ‘immigrant’, and their role as epistemic, axiological and emotional proximization triggers in the process of mediated construction of crisis and European security.

On Lexical Bundles in Polish Patient Information Leaflets: A Corpus-Driven Study

So far little attention has been paid to the corpus analysis of recurrent phraseologies found in Polish texts, in particular texts representing specialists registers of language use. Also, one may note the lack of corpus linguistic studies of lexical bundles (Biber et al. 1999) found in texts originally written in Polish. Conducted from a register perspective (Biber and Conrad 2009), this descriptive and exploratory study is intended as a first step towards a comprehensive corpus-driven description of the use and functions of the most frequent lexical bundles found in patient information leaflets (PILs), one of the most commonly used text types in the healthcare sector in Poland. The research material includes 100 PILs written originally in Polish, extracted from internet websites of ten pharmaceutical companies operating on the Polish market, compiled in a purpose-designed corpus of circa 197,000 words. Based largely on the methodology proposed by Biber, Conrad and Cortes (2003, 2004), Biber (2006), and Goźdź-Roszkowski (2011), which makes possible an analysis of the use and discourse functions of lexical bundles, the present study is primarily meant to provide methodological guidelines for future research on lexical bundles in Polish texts. This appears to be important since so far lexical bundles have been studied predominantly in texts originally written in English. The results of this preliminary research reveal salient links between the frequent occurrence of lexical bundles on the one hand, and situational and functional characteristics of the text variety under scrutiny on the other.

Towards Equivalence Links between Senses in PlWordNet and Princeton WordNet

Abstract The paper focuses on the issue of creating equivalence links in the domain of bilingual computational lexicography. The existing interlingual links between plWordNet and Princeton WordNet synsets (sets of synonymous lexical units – lemma and sense pairs) are re-analysed from the perspective of equivalence types as defined in traditional lexicography and translation. Special attention is paid to cognitive and translational equivalents. A proposal of mapping lexical units is presented. Three types of links are defined: super-strong equivalence, strong equivalence and weak implied equivalence. The strong equivalences have a common set of formal, semantic and usage features, with some of their values slightly loosened for strong equivalence. These will be introduced manually by trained lexicographers. The sense-mapping will partly draw on the results of the existing synset mapping. The lexicographers will analyse lists of pairs of synsets linked by interlingual relations such as synonymy, partial synonymy, hyponymy and hypernymy. They will also consult bilingual dictionaries and check translation probabilities in a parallel corpus. The results of the proposed mapping have great application potential in the area of natural language processing, translation and language learning.

Towards Teaching English for Pharmaceutical Purposes: An Attempt at a Description of Key Vocabulary and Phraseology in Clinical Trial Protocols and European Public Assessment Reports

With the exception of medical schools or medical universities, English for Pharmaceutical Purposes is rarely taught as a specialist language course or ESP module at the university-level (e.g. designed specifically for training translators of specialist texts). This may be caused by, among other factors, the lack of comprehensive description of vocabulary and phraseology used across different pharmaceutical text types and genres, e.g. patient-pharmacist interactions, patient information leaflets, clinical trial protocols etc. This preliminary study is designed as an initial step to develop a description of vocabulary and phraseology, namely keywords, n-grams consisting of 4 words and phrase frames based on n-grams consisting of 4 words all used in clinical trial protocols and European public assessment reports written originally in English. The analyses are aimed to provide an initial description of the use of distinctive lexis and phraseology found in the said text varieties. The results offer new, yet still preliminary, data for further descriptions of English used for pharmaceutical purposes to be conducted in the future.

STANCE BUNDLES IN ENGLISH-TO-POLISH TRANSLATION: A CORPUS-INFORMED STUDY

In this paper, we make an attempt to improve the textual fit of English-to-Polish translation of a peculiar type of multi-word units known in corpus linguistic literature as lexical bundles (Biber et al. 1999). Inspired by a study conducted by Grabar and Lefer (2015), we used the English-Polish parallel corpus Paralela (Pezik 2016) and the National Corpus of Polish (NKJP) to extract and explore the use - in terms of frequency distributions - of the Polish equivalents of selected English lexical bundles expressing attitudinal and epistemic stance. More precisely, we used the NKJP corpus to check whether the Polish equivalents are typical of contemporary Polish as found in native texts. The results of this corpus-informed study revealed a high number of Polish equivalents, both single- and multi-word units, expressing stance. Also, the results showed that the majority of Polish equivalents are frequently used in native Polish texts and therefore they can potentially help enhance the textual fit of translations. Finally, we discussed limitations of the methods and corpora used in this preliminary study and presented suggestions on how it can be pursued further in the future to better explore the usefulness of lexical bundles for translation teaching and translation practice. To that end, we also presented proposals of in-class translation activities.

Phrase Frames in English Pharmaceutical Discourse: A Corpus-Driven Study of Intradisciplinary Register Variation

Abstract Focusing on the exploration of intra-disciplinary register variation in the pharmaceutical domain, this corpus-driven study attempts to describe the use, composition and discourse functions of phrase frames, that is, contiguous sequences of words identical except for one (Fletcher, 2002-2007), found in samples of four English pharmaceutical text types, such as patient information leaflets, summaries of product characteristics, clinical trial protocols and chapters/sections from academic textbooks on pharmacology. The study deals with a specific sub-type of phrase frames, that is, 4-word units with a variable slot in the medial position, e.g. be * with caution, to take * medicine. The results showed, among others, that the use and discourse functions of phrase frames vary across pharmaceutical text types, that the correlation between the frequency of phrase frames and their pattern variability may depend on a register or genre, and that it is justified to treat the discourse functions of phrase frames as distinct from those of their textual variants.

Quantifying English and Polish Lolitas: A Corpus-Driven Stylistic Comparison

The study presented in this article, which is a fragment of a larger study of translational and non- translational texts (Grabowski 2012), falls within the scope of descriptive translation studies (DTS) and corpus linguistics, with particular emphasis on the study of translation universals, on the example of English-original (written in 1955) and two independent Polish translations of the novel Lolita by V. Nabokov (by Stiller in 1991 and Klobukowski in 1997). According to Baker (1995: 243), universal features of translation or translation universals, constitute specific textual characteristics (e.g. lexical, grammatical or stylistic) typical of translated texts, irrespective of languages involved in the translation process. In this study, which was completed with the use of corpus linguistics methodology, the texts were compared in terms of basic stylometric indicators presented through descriptive statistics, top-frequency wordlists, frequency profiles and frequency spectra. More specifically, the analysis aimed to compare the English-original and two Polish translations of Lolita in terms of text length, sentence length, number of repetitions (conciseness of style) as well as frequencies and distribution of both word-types (distinct words) and word-tokens (running words). Also, the aim was to find traces, if any, of translation universals (S-universals, after Chesterman 2004) attested in the Polish translations. The article concludes with suggestions as to research on translation universals in literary texts with the use of corpus linguistics methodology.

Crossing the Frontiers of Linguistic Typology: Lexical Differences and Translation Patterns in English and Russian Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

This article presents the results of the corpus-driven comparison between the English-original (1955) and Russian auto-translation (1967) of the novel Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. The aim of the study, which was facilitated by the computer program WordSmith Tools 4.0, was to answer the question whether the differences attested between the English and Russian parallel texts arise from translation strategies [Nabokov was an ardent advocate of literal translation as the only strategy of truly transposing the original text (Beaujour 1995: 716; Grayson 1977: 13–15)], or whether they are due to typological differences between the English and Russian languages. This corpus-driven study consists of two parts. The first part aims at a comparison of lexical wordlists (i.e. top-frequency lexical words) generated for English and Russian Lolita. The analysis revealed, among others, that Nabokov used synonymy as a frequent translation strategy (particularly in the case of English reporting verbs), which indicates that repetitions are regarded as a bad style in Russian texts. Moreover, the analysis highlighted a conspicuous typological difference between the two languages whereby Russian is more explicit semantically (i.e. words have more specific meaning distinctions) than English, which in turn is more ambiguous and vague in its surface forms (Comrie 1981: 31–79). The second part aims at an examination of translation strategies used by Nabokov while translating creative, author-specific hapax legomena, following a similar study of English and German prose conducted by Kenny (2001). The analysis revealed that Nabokov exhibited a strong tendency towards lexical normalization while translating creative hapax legomena into Russian. All in all, the corpus-driven analysis revealed that although translators are free to use multifarious translation strategies while transposing original texts, they are still at the mercy of typological differences between the relevant languages.