Extending the Scope of Corpus-Based Translation Studies

Sylviane Granger, Marie-Aude Lefer, Sylviane Granger, Marie-Aude Lefer

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781350280052
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350143272
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Translating & Interpreting
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

With the rapid growth of corpus-based translations studies (CBTS) over recent years, this book offers a timely overview of the field today. It features cutting-edge studies from leading experts in the area, focused on both professional and student translations, and covers the latest theoretical developments such as the constrained communication framework, with a strong focus on methodology, particularly mixed-method approaches, multivariate research designs and translation error annotation. The volume highlights the emerging interdisciplinary bridges between CBTS and other areas in linguistics and demonstrates the applications of these theories and methods to translator training. It also offers a forward-looking perspective by presenting some of the challenges CBTS currently faces and possible pathways for future research.

Thanks to its combined theoretical, methodological and applied perspective and innovative approaches, Extending the Scope of Corpus-Based Translation Studies will appeal to both seasoned specialists and newcomers to the field.

Part I

Corpus-based translation studies

Current challenges and future perspectives

1

Corpus-based translation and interpreting studies

A forward-looking review

Sylviane Granger and Marie-Aude Lefer

1 Introduction

The origin of corpus-based translation studies (CBTS) can be traced back to an article entitled ‘Corpus Linguistics and Translation Studies: Implications and Applications’ (1993). In that groundbreaking paper, Mona Baker convincingly argues against the view that translated texts are unworthy of academic enquiry and advocates applying the methods and techniques of corpus linguistics to translated texts. A few years later, Shlesinger (1998) made a similar proposal for interpreting. Since then the field of corpus-based translation and interpreting studies has greatly expanded and matured. Over a quarter of a century later it seems worth while to take stock of the most recent developments. The aim of our study is to carry out a thorough review, both quantitative and qualitative, of recent corpus-based studies of translation and interpreting with a view to describing their key characteristics in terms of data, methods and research foci, identifying potential gaps and suggesting avenues for future research.

The three most recent surveys of translation and interpreting studies (Candel-Mora and Vargas 2013, Zanettin et al. 2015 and van Doorslaer and Gambier 2015) differ from ours in a number of ways, the main one being that all three rely on large bibliographic databases and only analyse the bibliometric records, that is, the titles, keywords and abstracts, without delving into the full texts of the publications. Our survey is more limited in terms of the number and types of publications, but goes beyond the quantitative, mostly automatic investigation of bibliometric records in order to provide more qualitative insights thanks to an in-depth manual exploration of the full texts of the publications.

There are also differences of scope. The surveys by Zanettin et al. (2015) and van Doorslaer and Gambier (2015) cover much more ground than ours. Their aim is to identify the main subfields and research foci of translation studies as a whole, and they therefore provide only limited information on corpus-based studies. However, some interesting findings emerge. Zanettin et al. used the analytic categories in the Translation Studies Abstracts Online ¹ (TSA) database to identify the most popular subfields of translation and interpreting studies. The results show that the three most popular categories are literary translation, translation theory and intercultural studies. CBTS is only to be found among the next five largest categories, but seems to display an upward trend from 1996 to 2011. As corpus and parallel corpus also appear as keywords in a corpus of 16,000 abstracts compiled by the authors, they conclude that ‘[i]n terms of methodologies, the impact of linguistic corpora is noticeable and is a trend that is clearly here to stay’ (p. 20). The second survey, by van Doorslaer and Gambier (2015), makes use of the online Translation Studies Bibliography ² (TSB), which currently contains over 30,000 annotated records. An analysis of the authors’ academic affiliations provides useful information on the geographical spread of translation and interpreting research. Thanks to the extended list of searchable keywords in the TSB conceptual map, the authors are also able to identify the main topical foci (e.g. literary translation, terminology, teaching) of specific journals and to highlight differences in correlation with the language of publication. Unfortunately, the study fails to reveal any information on corpus-based studies, probably because the keyword analysis is limited to the five most frequent keywords in seven journals.

Unlike the preceding two surveys, Candel-Mora and Vargas-Sierra (2013) focus specifically on CBTS and pursue objectives similar to ours. Their aim is ‘to analyze with data the consolidation of corpus methods in translation and to specify which issues are under research and the features that characterize these studies’ (p. 317). Unlike our survey, however, their study relies on bibliometric records from two translation databases (Bibliography of Interpreting and Translation ³ and Translation Studies Abstracts Online). This allows them to provide a wide panorama of the field, based on a large number of publications (389).⁴ As regards the languages represented in the corpora, the survey shows that 40% of the bibliographic records that specify the language refer to a corpus of English or include English in the language pair investigated. The second most represented language, Spanish, falls way behind (13%). The types of corpora used are predominantly parallel corpora (58%), followed by comparable corpora (27%) and a combination of parallel and comparable corpora (15%). The survey also shows that specialized translations are far more numerous (69%) than literary translations (31%). Another interesting finding is that CBTS studies are published in similar proportions as book chapters (45%) and as journal articles (40%). Although the survey provides some useful information on corpus-based translation studies, the bibliometric method on which it is based has its limitations, the main one being that the bibliometric records, because they only contain the title, keywords and words in the abstracts, fail to provide information on many key features of CBTS. For example, only 109 out of 389 records (28%) specify the type of corpus used, and only 11, a mere 3%, refer to the size of the corpus, which considerably reduces the reliability of the conclusions drawn in respect of these aspects. As regards corpus orientation (research, teaching or professional), the authors acknowledge that ‘this parameter cannot be interpr eted appropriately without carrying out an in-depth study of the publications’ (p. 324).

Alongside bibliometric analyses, which ‘have the ability to offer factual, quantitatively based, but sometimes also broader views on tendencies in a discipline’ (van Doorslaer and Gambier 2015: 317), we believe there is scope for a survey of corpus-based translation and interpreting studies which relies on manual, in-depth exploration of the actual texts of the publications, thereby allowing for the investigation of qualitative information which is not captured – and indeed in some cases cannot be captured – by an analysis of bibliometric records. Our survey is based on a relatively small number of scientific articles, but as these studies cover the most recent years (2012–19), they provide a worthwhile snapshot of the latest trends in the field and point the way forward for further research.

The chapter is structured as follows. The first two sections specify the scope of the survey (Section 2) and the method used to extract the survey data (Section 3). The next sections present the results of the survey. Section 4 subcategorizes the corpus-based studies in terms of three main types of corpus orientation, which are analysed in the following sections: methodology- and theory-oriented studies in Section 5, applied studies in Section 6 and empirical studies in Section 7. The dominant category, that of empirical studies, is further explored along three main axes: linguistic focus and translation features, corpus design, and corpus techniques and statistical testing. Section 8 sums up the main findings of the survey and makes some recommendations on desirable developments in the field.

2 Delineating the scope of the survey

In the framework of the present survey, it is essential to establish what qualifies as a bona fide corpus-based study. Our starting point is Baker’s 1993 paper, which sums up the key features of CBTS:

This paper explores the impact that the availability of corpora is likely to have on the study of translation as an empirical phenomenon. It argues that the techniques and methodology developed in the field of corpus linguistics will have a direct impact on the emerging discipline of translation studies, particularly with respect to its theoretical and descriptive branches. The nature of this impact is discussed in some detail and brief reference is made to some of the applications of corpus techniques in the applied branch of the discipline. (p. 233; our underlining)

The first key point is that CBTS is an empirical approach to translation, situated within descriptive translation studies: ‘Through the 1970s and beyond, descriptive translation studies (DTS) foregrounded description of what translation was and is, removing from dominance previous approaches that were more concerned with prescribing what translation should be. Corpus-based studies in translation are clearly aligned with the descriptive perspective’ (Olohan 2004: 10). For Laviosa (2011: 14), ‘[t]he strong links forged in those years between Corpus Linguistics and DTS thanks to a set of common concerns stemming from an empirical perspective is (. . .) one of the keys if not the key to the success story of CTS [corpus-based translation studies]’. Second, Baker clearly underlines that CBTS is an offshoot of corpus linguistics, from which it borrows its specific techniques and methods. These involve both ‘basic text processing operations’ (Baker 1995: 226), such as concordancing and word frequency profiling, and more sophisticated techniques, such as automatic annotation and extraction of keywords, collocations, colligations and word clusters (Zanettin 2012). Finally, Baker underlines the three main objectives of CBTS: to contribute to the theoretical, descriptive and applied branches of translation studies. In the article, Baker further specifies the scope and objectives of CBTS. The term corpus is key in CBTS, and Baker insists on its ambiguity in translation studies: ‘although the words corpus and corpora are beginning to figure prominently in the literature on translation, they do not refer to the same kind of corpora that we tend to talk about in linguistics’ (1993: 241). In a later article she returns to this issue and specifies what exactly is meant by corpus in CBTS: ‘any collection of running texts (as opposed to examples/sentences), held in electronic form and analysable automatically or semi-automatically (rather than manually)’ (Baker 1995: 225). The way we need to understand the term corpus in CBTS is therefore quite different from the way it is regularly used in translation studies, namely to refer to ‘fairly small collections of text which are not hel...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I Corpus-based translation studies: Current challenges and future perspectives
• Part II Recent methodological and theoretical developments in CBTS
• Part III Corpus-based empirical studies
• Part IV Corpus use in translator training
• Index
• Copyright