Empirical Translation Studies - Interdisciplinary Methodologies Explored - Meng Ji
6. On semantic differences between translated and non-translated Dutch. Using bidirectional parallel corpus data for measuring and visualizing distances between lexemes in the semantic field of inceptiveness
Empirical Translation Studies - Interdisciplinary Methodologies Explored - Meng Ji
Lore Vandevoorde [+]
Ghent University, Belgium
Gert De Sutter [+]
Ghent University, Belgium
Koen Plevoets [+]
University of Leuven, Belgium
Description
The aim of this paper is to make a first attempt towards measuring semantic differences between translated and non-translated language. More particularly, we present a quantitative bottom-up corpus-based method for the identification of lexical items in a semantic field. The proposed method will enable us to measure and to visualize semantic similarity between the elements in that field (i.e. the field of inceptiveness in Dutch), using bidirectional parallel corpus data (Dutch-French). This method builds on the successful implementation of parallel corpora within contrastive linguistics to discern semantic fields (Dyvik 1998; 2004; Aijmer & Simon-Vandenbergen 2004, 2006; Simon-Vandenbergen 2013), while simultaneously overcoming one of its drawbacks, viz. the accurate, statistics-based visualization of the observed fields.