Constructions-and-frames analysis of translations

2013

Translation can generally be seen as a task in which the meaning of the original should be preserved as far as possible. This paper formulates the preservation of meaning in terms of theprimacy of the framehypothesis: ideally, the frame of the original is matched by the frame of the translation. I investigate one factor overriding this principle in translations between English and German through the examination of two grammatical constructions, one in English, one in German, which are not commonly available in the other language. Picking a construction comparable in function in the target language leads to frame shifts. In addition to highlighting the interplay between construction and fram…

Review of Oakes & Ji (2012): Quantitative Methods in Corpus-Based Translation Studies

2014