Empirical Translation Studies - Interdisciplinary Methodologies Explored - Meng Ji

Empirical Translation Studies - Interdisciplinary Methodologies Explored - Meng Ji

5. Modelling proximity in a corpus of literary retranslations: A methodological proposal for clustering texts based on systemic-functional annotation of lexicogrammatical features

Empirical Translation Studies - Interdisciplinary Methodologies Explored - Meng Ji

Adriana Pagano [+-]
Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brasil
Adriana Pagano is Professor in the Graduate Program in Linguistics and Applied Linguistics at the Laboratory for Experimentation in Translation, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brasil.
Giacomo Patrocinio Figueredo [+-]
Federal University of Ouro Preto (UFOP), Brazil
Giacomo Figueredo is Lecturer of Applied Linguistics at the Federal University of Ouro Preto (UFOP), Brazil, where he teaches English as a foreign language and translation theory for undergraduate students. He has an M.A. and Ph.D. in Applied Linguistics from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), Brazil. He has worked as a professional translator and carried out research in the field of Translation Studies, mainly in linguistic approaches to translation. His research interests include systemic theory, functional grammar, language description, typology and translation, focusing on English and Brazilian Portuguese. He coordinates the Multilingual Meaning Production Group at UFOP and is currently working on a description of Brazilian Portuguese for multilingual text production drawing on equivalence and shifts among language systems when paired with Brazilian Portuguese.
Annabelle Lukin [+-]
Macquarie University
Annabelle Lukin is Senior Lecturer in Linguistics in the Centre for Language in Social Life, Macquarie University. She is interested in understanding more fully what it means to analyse text and linguistically construed social context in the terms established and developed in the work of linguists such as Halliday and Hasan. She works in particular in the areas of media and political discourse, and in literature, including literature and translation, and she has published in all these areas. She is co-editor (with Geoff Williams) of Language Development: Functional Perspectives on Species and Individuals (Continuum). She curates the ‘SFL Linguists’ site on VIMEO, and contributes to Wikipedia on topics in linguistics, especially on people and ideas from the systemic functional linguistics tradition.

Description

This chapter seeks to contribute to a model for quantitative exploration of translated texts by adopting clustering techniques to search for patterns of comparability in a corpus of retranslations. Drawing on systemic-functional theory (Halliday & Matthiessen, 2004) as a framework for text analysis, it reports on an exploratory study aimed at investigating source – target text relations as computed through statistical methods for a manually annotated representative text sample. Annotation built on the analytical framework used for comparing source and target texts, which is based on categories of grammatical functions common to both source and target language systems. The corpus was compiled from ten translations of a source text -- a short story written in English by Katherine Mansfield -- into Spanish and Portuguese by different translators over a period of six decades. The texts were explored in terms of the ‘retranslation hypothesis’ (Berman 1990), whereby retranslations tend to be more source-oriented than first translations, orientation being established in our study on the basis of the distance between source and target text as computed through cluster analysis. The results obtained point to similarities between texts computed on the basis of categories ascribed to the lexicogrammatical choices made by each author within the grammatical systems analyzed. They also corroborate the findings of other researchers who have used other approaches and methodologies to probe the ‘retranslation hypothesis’, in that they confirmed the relative distance of a first translation from the source text, while they also showed varied degrees of proximity of retranslations to the source text, the former being in some cases further away from the latter than first translations.

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Citation

Pagano, Adriana; Figueredo, Giacomo Patrocinio; Lukin, Annabelle. 5. Modelling proximity in a corpus of literary retranslations: A methodological proposal for clustering texts based on systemic-functional annotation of lexicogrammatical features. Empirical Translation Studies - Interdisciplinary Methodologies Explored. Equinox eBooks Publishing, United Kingdom. p. 93-127 Jan 2016. ISBN 9781781790496. https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/view-chapter/?id=23916. Date accessed: 28 Mar 2024 doi: 10.1558/equinox.23916. Jan 2016

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