Cross-Linguistic Variation in System and Text

A Methodology for the Investigation of Translations and Comparable Texts

Elke Teich

• Publisher: De Gruyter Mouton
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9783110176155
• eBook ISBN: 9783110896541
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: German Language
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

The intuition that translations are somehow different from texts that are not translations has been around for many years, but most of the common linguistic frameworks are not comprehensive enough to account for the wealth and complexity of linguistic phenomena that make a translation a special kind of text.

The present book provides a novel methodology for investigating the specific linguistic properties of translations. As this methodology is both corpus-based and driven by a functional theory of language, it is powerful enough to account for the multi-dimensional nature of cross-linguistic variation in translations and cross-lingually comparable texts.

Table of contents

• 1 Introduction
• 1 Goals
• 2 Motivation
• 3 Methods
• 4 Road map through this book
• 2 State-of-the-art
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Multilingual research: Objectives and methods
• 3 Hawkins’comparative typology of English and German .
• 4 Doherty's research on English-German contrasts in translations
• 5 Baker's universal features of translations
• 6 Contrastive linguistics: Register analysis
• 7 Summary and conclusions
• 3 Theory and model of cross-linguistic variation
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Systemic Functional Linguistics
• 2.1 Systemic Functional Linguistics: Theory
• 2.2 Systemic Functional Linguistics: Model
• 3 Model of cross-linguistic variation
• 3.1 Stratification
• 3.2 Rank
• 3.3 Metafunction
• 3.4 Axis
• 3.5 Delicacy
• 3.6 Instantiation
• 4 Summary and envoi
• 4 System: English-German grammatical contrasts and common alities
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The grammar of the clause
• 2.1 Transitivity and voice: Introduction
• 2.2 Mood and modality: Introduction
• 2.3 Theme/Rheme and Given/New: introduction
• 3 Other ranks
• 3.1 The nominal group in English and German
• 3.2 The prepositional phrase in English and German
• 3.3 Other contrastive features: Verbal group and word ranks
• 4 Summary of major contrasts and commonalities
• 5 Text: English-German comparable texts and translations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Hypotheses and their testing
• 2.1 Formulation of hypotheses
• 2.2 Corpus design
• 2.3 Testing of hypotheses
• 2.4 Tools and techniques
• 3 Analyses and interpretation of hypotheses
• 3.1 Basic descriptive statistics
• 3.2 Linguistic annotation and querying
• 3.3 Results
• 3.4 Contrastive register analysis (multilingually comparable texts)
• 3.5 Comparison of translations and comparable texts (monolingually comparable texts)
• 3.6 Translation analysis (parallel texts)
• 3.7 Interpretation of results
• 4 Summary and conclusions
• 6 Summary and conclusions
• 1 Summary: Cross-linguistic variation in multilingual texts
• 2 Assessment of the methodology
• 3 Envoi: Other contexts of application; issues for future research
• Appendix A: Text sources
• Appendix B: Statistical table
• Appendix C: Analysis results in tabular form
• Notes
• References
• Subject Index
• Author Index