Exploiting the Incomparability of Comparable Corpora for Contrastive Linguistics and Translation Studies
For empirical research in translation studies and contrastive linguistics comparability across languages is an important and non-trivial issue, particularly, if we aim at quantifying differences and commonalities. We approach this problem by investigating the CroCo Corpus of English and German originals and translations in eight different registers concentrating on the (in)comparability of the different subcorpora. They are comparable across languages but incomparable in terms of functional, i.e. register, variation. A feature matrix is analysed to reveal differences and commonalities between the bilingually comparable texts (i.e. English and German originals) and the monolingually comparab…
Cohesive explicitness and explicitation in an English-German translation corpus
Explicitness or implicitness as assumed properties of translated texts and other texts in multilingual communication have for some time been the object of speculation and, at a later stage, of more systematic research in linguistics and translation studies. This paper undertakes an investigation of explicitness/implicitness and related phenomena of translated texts on the level of cohesion. A corpus-based research architecture, embedded in an empirical research methodology, will be outlined, and first results and possible explanations will be discussed. The paper starts with a terminological clarification of the concepts of ‘explicitness’ and ‘explicitation’ in terms of dependent variables …