Towards a definition of Interpretese: An intermodal, corpus-based study

This chapter discusses the implication of corpus-based translation studies as a new research methodology in translation studies, which expands the scope of translation studies. The chapter then analyzes factors to be investigated in corpus-based translation studies following an analysis of the problems that arise. Despite all the limitations, corpus-based translation studies promise to be a worthy field for research in translation studies.

Yabancı dil eğitimi açısından derlem tabanlı çalışmalarının önemi giderek artmaktadır. Derlem tabanlı çalışmalar aracılığı ile dil eğitiminde öğretilen kelimelerin öncelikleri uluslararası kıstaslar çerçevesinde belirlenmektedir. Yazılı ve sözlü birçok tabakadan oluşan derlemler ve alt derlemler hem öğretici hem de öğrenci için sürecin verimliliğini artırmaktadır. Yabancı dil olarak Türkçe öğretiminde genellikle ders materyallerinin söz varlığı üzerine odaklanılmaktadır. Öğrenen bireylerin söz varlığı da bu süreçte araştırmacılar için üzerinde durulması gereken alanlardandır. Yabancı dil olarak Türkçe öğrenen bireylerin yazılı ya da sözlü söz varlığı hem mevcut durumu görmek için hem de sıklık listeleri ile kıyaslamalar yapabilmek için gözetilmektedir. Ders kitapları bünyesinde yer alan metinler öğretim programı ve öğretici için çatı konumundadır. Bu çalışmada da Yabancı dil olarak Türkçe öğrenen B1 düzeyi öğrencilerin yazılı söz varlığı, derste kullanılan materyallerin okuma metinlerinin söz varlığı ve Aksan vd. (2017) derlem tabanlı çalışması araştırmanın odak noktasını oluşturmaktadır. Araştırma çerçevesinde 6 haftalık B1 kuru süresince 21 öğrenciye 7 farklı kompozisyon yazdırılmıştır. Akabinde öğrencilerin yazılı söz varlığının belirlenmesi için bu kompozisyonlar bilgisayar ortamına aktarılmış; kullanılan ders kitabındaki okuma metinleri ilgili aşamalardan geçirilerek söz varlığının belirlenmesinde kullanılacak yazılım için uygun hale getirilmiştir. Ders kitabının söz varlığı ve öğrencilerin yazılı anlatımlarının söz varlığında en sık kullanılan 500 kelime, sözcük türleri bakımından en sık kullanılan 500 kelime Aksan’ın (2017) çalışması ile kıyaslanmış, benzerlik düzeyleri tespit edilmiştir. En sık kullanılan kelimeler bakımından Aksan (2017) derlem tabanlı çalışması ile ders materyalinin söz varlığının benzerlik düzeyi bakımından istenen ideal düzeyde olmadığı saptanmıştır.

As the literature on COVID-19-themed translation continues to expand, the area of corpus-based cultural translation in this context still needs to be explored. This study investigates the types of information sharing and new databases that have emerged in response to the COVID-19 pandemic and assesses the feasibility of human-machine interaction in the selection of translation strategies. Our study employs a systematic approach to analyze and compare the linguistic characteristics of epidemic-related English texts with those of general English texts. Using a keyword extraction method, we identify unique vocabulary features in each text type and then focus on the most salient features specific to the epidemic-related context. Drawing from COVID-19 and SARS-CoV-2 related research, the study examines the importance of texts in complex social situations, their influential role, and the potential for human-machine collaboration in translation strategy selection. The findings suggest combining functional equivalence theory and corpus analysis methods can effectively enhance cross-cultural communication for epidemic-related themes. This approach leads to improved translation quality through increased cohesion and coherence. The research delves deeper into the translation process by building upon the insights gained from the corpus study and adopting a communicative perspective. It goes beyond simply identifying equivalent terms and tackles the transfer of discursive phenomena, such as collocations, terminological variations, and semantic prosody from the source to the target language. The findings of this study confirm that corpus-based translation studies' contribution to ESP implies moving towards a communicative and socially oriented approach to specialized language.

The corpus-linguistic approach in translation studies, which gained prominence in the discipline with the study of translation universals (Baker 1995), became one of the most significant and prolific research paradigms of recent decades, largely thanks to technological advances and increasingly sophisticated research tools. This development laid the foundations for corpus-based translation studies. At the same time, the growing professionalization of the field and the digitalization of the translation industry have transformed not only the translation process and the role of the translator (Eszenyi et al.2023, Massey et al.2023) but also the linguistic characteristics of translated texts (Daems et al. 2018, De Clercq et al. 2021). The augmented translation environment – characterized by the widespread use of CAT tools and the rapidly improving performance of neural machine translation (NMT) and generative AI – raises the question of whether it is still appropriate to speak of translation, translators, transfer operations, and translation universals in the traditional sense or new definitions are needed. Against this backdrop, the present paper explores how the project-based approach, the digital transformation and growing automation have affected the translation process and translated discourse, while also considering the past, present, and future challenges of corpus construction, corpus design, and corpus-based translation research.

Corpus-based translation studies (CTS) is a very new technique in translation studies. In Bible translation, researchers have been collating corpora of source texts since the eighteenth century. In recent times, corpora of translated Bible texts have also been generated by a number of researchers. Thus the notion of working with corpora rather than with individual texts is not new to Bible translation. However, until very recently these corpora were examined manually, so that the introduction of computer-aided tools for corpus analysis represents a significant advancement for the Bible translator or researcher. By its very nature, the Bible lends itself remarkably well to (computerised) corpus projects. It is by definition a corpus of 66 books, and the pre-existing divisions into books, chapters and verses gives it an unusual advantage in annotation over literary works in the context of a parallel corpus. This article looks at the ways in which the Bible and its translations lend themselves to the formation of a specific corpus, the types of corpora and texts that could be considered as well as the challenges involved in producing these parallel corpora. The article then goes on to examine the potential applications of such a corpus for both the production of new Bible translations and the evaluation of existing ones. Applications to other nonreligious linguistic problems are also explored. In assessing these challenges, it becomes evident that CTS indeed redefines the nature of translation research as well as the role of the researcher. Finally, the status of existing projects to produce a parallel corpus based on Biblical texts will be reported.

The pervasiveness of corpus-based research in the broad interdisciplinary field of translation studies is well attested. This editorial briefly reports on some of the most significant academic initiatives undertaken in corpus-based translation studies in recent years. It introduces each of the eight papers selected for this special issue of Research in Corpus Linguistics (RiCL). In doing so, the editorial will highlight their distinctive contribution to the interdisciplinarity of translation and interpreting studies.

This chapter discusses the role played by corpus linguistics in contemporary translation studies in past decades. We will begin with an introduction to the fundamental reformative influence of corpus linguistics upon the methodologies of the contemporary linguistic research, which is then followed by a more detailed description of the most frequently used types of corpora, particularly multilingual corpora, in contrastive linguistic research and translation studies. We will also introduce a growing paradigm of research by exploring the latest developments in corpus-based translation studies.

This chapter begins with an overview of the studies on translational Chinese over the past decades in China. Traditionally, translation studies would take translational language as a source of examples for the discussion of translation techniques, the focus being on the choice of words or structures; little is said about the language as a whole. Nowadays, translational language is an independent system or variety, of which the holistic and macroscopic features become accessible in the era of corpus linguistics under the strong support of IT. In China, corpus-based translation studies have a history of a mere 10 years. However, such a short period marks a rapid development both in the building of parallel corpus and researches on that basis. A good case in point is the employment of parallel corpora in the study of the development of Mandarin in the twentieth century. In this study, we look into the evolution of Mandarin from a CLC (construction’s load capacity) perspective. It finds that the evolution of Mandarin is clearly shown in the increase of CLC and in the structural complexity of the constituents in the constructions, and it goes in parallel with the sudden and rapid changes typical of translational Mandarin after the May 4th Movement. However, it should be noted that, considering what original Mandarin selectively replicates are the features of translational language but not those of the source language (Western languages), the so-called Europeanization does not exist.

This paper delves into the multifaceted world where translation studies converge with corpus linguistics, casting a spotlight on the dynamic domain of media language. By harnessing the power of a corpus-based methodology, our research meticulously dissects the intricate process of translating and adapting media texts within a panoply of linguistic landscapes and cultural contexts. The core objective of the study is to excavate and analyze the pantheon of linguistic attributes and the repertoire of tactics translators wield in the realm of media, unlocking a treasure trove of understanding pertaining to cultural subtleties and the nuanced art of translation practices. Our exploration traverses a broad spectrum of media genres, encompassing the rigor of news journalism, the creative complexity of television programming, and the viral nature of digital content, to construct a comprehensive understanding of the translation phenomena at play. The findings illuminate the myriad ways in which media narratives are reconfigured and presented to global audiences, ultimately enriching the discourse on how translation shapes and is shaped by the currents of worldwide communication. This study, therefore, serves as a crucial beacon for academics, professionals, and enthusiasts poised at the crossroads of linguistics and cultural exchange, guiding them through the labyrinth of media translation and its profound influence on international dialogues and perceptions.

This study uses Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling to compare thematic structures in Yu Hua's novel To Live and its English translation, examining how themes are preserved or altered. After digitizing and preprocessing both texts, separate LDA models yielded six topics for the Chinese original and five for the English version. Key findings show high fidelity for core themes like war and family. For example, war-related topics strongly aligned across versions. However, secondary or culturally specific themes, such as gambling, were diluted or merged in the English translation, while familial themes were consolidated. The research concludes that translation reframes narratives by altering lexical and thematic organization. Topic modeling effectively highlights these shifts, underscoring the translator's role as a narrative architect and offering a valuable method for digital literary and corpus-based translation studies.

The Introduction presents the chronological evolution of the practices employed in the translation of the language of cultural heritage. All the Chapters in this volume share close ties with the objectives of the research project «Multilingual Cultural Heritage Lexicon» and follow three trajectories: 1. The translations of Vasari as primary sources for the origins of the lexicon of the arts in Europe 2. Considerations on translation praxis and teaching of different text types of cultural heritage 3. The latest developments in the compilation and use of translational corpora in relation to local heritage sites. Through a diachronic and a synchronic perspective, all chapters contribute to the existing literature on Corpus-based Translation Studies (CTS) of the language of cultural heritage.

This paper explores the potential of modern information resources such as supracorpora databases for the multidimensional study of punctuation. On the one hand, in different natural languages, while the repertoire of punctuation marks and their graphic representations tend to coincide, there may be zones of functional divergence, so that the rules of placement of the same punctuation mark will differ from one language to another. To know these interlingual discrepancies is fundamentally important for a human translator and for training machine transla-tion systems; otherwise, the translation may significantly distort the semantic content of its source text. Some of these differences were recorded in the pre-corpus era. More of them can be revealed with the aid of supracorpora databases, modern information resources created through the joint efforts of computer science, com-putational linguistics, and corpus-based translation studies; they not only help to verify the existing knowledge on a wide scale of texts but also to amplify it. On the other hand, punctuation has traditionally been regarded as an area of language that is fairly well-studied, tightly regulated, and therefore least susceptible to change and innovation. However, supracorpora databases provide an opportunity to identify new (not yet found in the normative literature) functional-semantic features of the use of a given punctuation mark. Nowadays, the development of artificial intelligence-based technologies, namely voice assistants, makes it particularly important to thoroughly research the functional semantics of punctuation marks. The paper shows the opportunities that supracorpora databases provide for punctuation studies, using the example of the exclamation mark in Russian and French.

Concurrently with the publication of Baker's influential work (1995) on corpora and translation and the corresponding rapid progress in technology, there has been a marked proliferation of newly released and highly innovative publications in this rapidly expanding domain of expertise (refer to Youdale, 2019; Vasheghani Farahani, 2022 for illustrative examples). One of the seminal works in corpus-based translation studies is the ground-breaking volume edited by Granger & Aude Lefer and published by Bloomsbury in 2022, which is widely recognized as a pioneering contribution to the field.

This paper describes in depth the data collection and exploitation stages in constructing the undergraduate learner translator corpus (ULTC), a 75 million-word sentence-aligned bidirectional parallel corpus of Arabic, English, and French, with Arabic as its central language. We focus on the methodological challenges, and describe the compilation process and problems encountered in the first phase of the project. Our aim is to inform future compilers of similar projects that integrate learner corpus research (LCR) and corpus-based translation studies (CBTS). In the first part, we present design considerations, data collection criteria, and the exploitation of the corpus, and in the second part, we evaluate the systems we used and possible improvements

This study analyses the translation process into English of terms and expressions in the works written respectively by the anthropologists Roberto Da Matta and Darcy Ribeiro and in their respective translation. Our research project draws on Corpus-Based Translation Studies (Baker, 1995, 1996, 2000; Camargo, 2007), Corpus Linguistics (Berber Sardinha, 2004) and on some concepts of Terminology (Barros, 2004). Results show that terms do not present univocity within the language related to Brazilian Anthropology.The translated terms also reflect a cultural change due to the options chosen by the respective translators for the target language.