Strategies, norms or universals?Investigating variation in translation

Silvia BernardiniUniversity of Bologna, Italy

silvia.bernardini@unibo.itAston Corpus Symposium 2009

Resuming…

• Last year’s talk:

Theoretical background

• Target-oriented approach to the study of translation (Toury 1995)

• Focus on the TT within its context of fruition• Identification of norms and laws of translation, e.g.

– Law of growing standardisation » More frequent target language options are preferred

– Law of interference » Source text linguistic features are transferred onto the

target text

• Descriptive rather than prescriptive/pedagogic focus

• Corpus-based approach to the study of translation (Baker 1993, Olohan 2004)

Theoretical background

“the most important task that awaits the application of corpus techniques in translation studies […] is the elucidation of the nature of translated text as a mediated communicative event. In order to do this, it will be necessary to develop tools that will enable us to identify universal features of translation, that is features which typically occur in translated text rather than original utterances and which are not the result of interference from specific linguistic systems”. (Baker 1993: 243)

Theoretical background

• Tools– Monolingual comparable corpora

• Originals in language A and translations into the same language from 1 or more other languages

• Universal features (hypothesised)– e.g.: explicitness, simplification, disambiguation, preference for

conventional grammar, avoidance of repetition, normalisation…

• Types of observations– Lower % of content vs. grammatical words (Laviosa 1998)– Fewer contractions (Olohan 2003)– Fewer TL-specific “unique items” (Tirkkonen-Condit 2004)– …

Summary of old study: corpora

• 2 small monolingual comparable corpora of fiction text samples– One in English (original and translated from It)– One in Italian (original and translated from En)

• 2 small parallel corpora– The translations from the corpora above,

aligned to their source texts

+ Reference corpora of English and Italian

Summary of old study: method

1. Collect token frequencies from reference corpora for all candidate collocation types observed in monolingual comparable corpora

2. Rank (MI/Fq) and compare rankings (Mann-Whitney ranks test)

3. For significantly different rankings, analyse translation shifts at parallel level

Summary of old study: findings

• MCC analysis:– Translated fiction texts (Italian and English)

tend to be (overall) richer in collocations than original texts in the same language

• Parallel analysis:– Confirms that differences due to translation

shifts rather than unrelated variables

• The data provide support for the law of growing standardisation

Moving on: technical translation

• Are results re: translation norms and strategies observed in fiction corpora confirmed by analyses of technical translation corpora?

• i.e., is there (more) evidence of– Growing standardisation or– Interference

• In translations compared to (comparable) originals?

Choosing an LSPPerl documentation

• Practical Extraction and Report Language

• Popular programming language

• Most communication happens in English

• Efforts to produce documentation (original and translated) in Italian– Winning more people to the cause

Why perl?

• Initial stimulus: technical translation course at SSLMIT (1 year of MA)– pod2it project

• Very favourable authentic conditions, near-experimental– Neatly delimited topic/discourse community– Both originals and translations drafted by area

experts (not linguists)

Originals (En) and translations (It) (e.g.)perl pods

NAME perlboot - Beginner's Object-Oriented Tutorial

DESCRIPTIONIf you're not familiar with objects from other languages, some of the other Perl object documentation may be a little daunting, such as perlobj, a basic reference in using objects, and perltoot, which introduces readers to the peculiarities of Perl's object system in a tutorial way.

NOME perlboot - Introduzione alla tecnologia Orientata agli Oggetti (titolo originale: Beginner's Object-Oriented Tutorial)

DESCRIZIONE Se non avete già una certa familiarità con la tecnologia ad oggetti degli altri linguaggi di programmazione, parte della documentazione sulla OOP in Perl potrebbe essere un po‘ intimidatoria: perlobj, una guida di riferimento sull'utilizzo degli oggetti e perltoot che introduce il lettore alle particolarità della tecnologia ad oggetti del Perl con un taglio introduttivo.

Italian originals (e.g.)

Method

• Corpus design– Monolingual component

1. Translated Italian texts (PERLTRIT)

2. Original Italian texts (PERLORIT)

– Parallel component• (English Source texts of translated component)

(PERLOREN)• Translated Italian texts (PERLTRIT)

The perl corpus

PERLOREN PERLORIT PERLTRIT

tokens 298,346 305,537 321,405

types 18,639 22,495 22,768

texts 43 89 43

authorstranslators

16---

30---

---11

Original English(STs of PERLTRIT)

Original Italian (comparable)

Translated Italian (TTs of PERLOREN)

Corpus preparation

• Download texts (plain txt)

• Record relevant meta-data (readme file)– url, author, author’s cv, notes

• Tag and lemmatise (Tree Tagger)

• Align parallel component (EasyAlign)

• Index with the CWB

Assembling evidence

• Research question– Translated fiction texts (Italian and English)

show evidence of growing standardisation (at the collocational level)

Universal or norm/law-governed? What happens in technical translation?

Evidence of standardisationsupport for the “universality” hypothesis

Evidence of interferencesupport for the “norm/law” hypothesis

Assembling evidence

• Look for differences btwn originals and translations in Italian that:– could be interpreted as a consequence of

either interference or standardisation– are not (likely to be) the result of unrelated

variables– are sufficiently frequent in this technical field

to allow confident judgement

?

Case study: borrowings and calques

• English words• New Italian words based on English

terms or new senses derived from English “false friends”

• English morphosyntactic marks (plural)

• More frequent in 1. originals or 2. translations?

Case study: borrowings and calques

if 1, than translators could be seen as conforming to TL “normal” use more than original authors of comparable texts => standardisation

If 2, than translators could be hypothesised to be more subject to interference from the SL than original authors of comparable texts => interference

Identifying foreign/calqued words in corpora

1. Keywords– each corpus is used in turn as a reference

corpusa. All words (to identify borrowings)

b. Verbs only (to identify calques)

2. Words ending in –s • To compare use of non-Italian morphological

marks (unadapted borrowings)

1a Keyword analysis: all words

• Use one corpus as a reference corpus to highlight words that are significantly more frequent in the other

• Define what counts as a keyword• Cut-off point: 5• Log-likelihood ordering• Top 100 types

• Browse lists, select potential key-borrowings, check concordances

Problems

• Most “keywords” identify topics – that’s what keywords are meant to do after all

• Some signal differences btwn English/Italian writing strategies or possibly slight genre differences

• For instance…

PERLORIT PERLTRIT

PERLTRIT PERLTRIT (cont’d) PERLORIT

178.4 package 65.6 local 131.0 script

148.2 match* 63.7 buffer 130.7 expression

94.6 char 54.9 point 123.2 regular

87.7 filehandle 54.4 record 118.7 array

83.7 locale 53.4 long 75.0 overloading

83.3 require 51.7 pack 54.1 print

72.3 unpack 50.5 thread 50.7 reference

66.9 socket 48.6 Encode 37.5 matching*

66.9 shift 46.5 pipe 34.1 Hello

More borrowings in translated Italian than in original Italian…?

Looking closer: PERLTRIT

• Unrelated variables– Larger amount of code text

• char, filehandle, shift, require, (un)pack

– Different topics • locale, encode, (code) point, long

– Morphological differences• match/matching

– Dubious cases• socket, buffer, record, thread, pipe

Alternatives?1. Socket

– “…anche chiamato zoccolo, è una tipologia di connettore utilizzata in elettronica”

– Zoccolo: 0 occurrences in corpus2. Buffer

– “…letteralmente tampone: in italiano, memoria tampone o anche intermediaria, di transito”

– Tampone, intermediaria, di transito: 0 occ’s in corpus3. Record

– “In informatica il record è un oggetto di un database strutturato in dati che contiene un insieme di campi o elementi, ciascuno dei quali possiede nome e tipo propri.”

4. Thread– “Un thread o thread di esecuzione è una suddivisione di un

programma in due o più task che vengono eseguiti in modo concorrente.”

5. Pipe– “Nei sistemi operativi una pipe è uno degli strumenti disponibili per

far comunicare tra loro dei processi. “Wikipedia

One candidate left:

In fact, if anything, translations would seem to show a slight preference for

“pacchetto” compared to original texts

package % pacchetto % package + pacchetto

%

PERLTRIT 357 78.8 96 21.1 453 100

PERLORIT 81 84.3 15 15.6 96 100

Looking closer: originals…

PERLORIT131.0 script130.7 expression123.2 regular118.7 array75.0 overloading54.1 print50.7 reference37.5 matching*34.1 Hello

PERLORIT

Searches:

[word="regular" %cd] [word="expressions?" %cd];

[lem="espressione" %cd] [lem="regolare" %cd];

regular expression

% espressione regolare

% reg. expr. + espr. reg.

%

PERLORIT 109 50.9 105 49.0 214 100

PERLTRIT 10 5.9 157 94.0 167 100

PERLORIT

reference % riferimento % reference + riferimento

%

PERLORIT 88 38.2 142 61.7 230 100

PERLTRIT 19 3.9 464 96.0 483 100

Searches:

[word=“references?" %cd];

[lem=“riferimento" %cd];

PERLORIT

Hello worldvs

Ciao mondo

hello % ciao % hello+ciao %

PERLORIT 31 31 69 69 100 100

PERLTRIT 1 2.2 43 97.7 44 100

Searches:

[word=“hello?" %cd];

[word=“ciao" %cd];

Looking closer: originals…

PERLORIT131.0 script130.7 expression123.2 regular118.7 array75.0 overloading54.1 print50.7 reference37.5 matching*34.1 Hello

Summing up: 1a borrowings (all)

• The translated corpus contains more key-borrowings than the original corpus

• However, in most cases this is due to topic differences

• In no cases could we identify English words found in the translated corpus with alternative Italian renderings favoured in the original corpus

• On the other hand, at least 4 out of 8 key-borrowings found in the original corpus have alternative Italian renderings favoured in the translated corpus

1b Calqued verbs

• Verbs that are significantly more frequent in PERLORIT than in PERLTRIT and viceversa

• Cut-off point: 2• Log-likelihood ordering• Top 100 types

• Separate searches for:– Lemmas that are “unknown” to the tagger

• To search for real calques

– Lemmas that are “not unknown” to the tagger• To search for existing Italian verbs with calqued meanings

Results

PERLORIT PERLTRIT

known lemma known lemma

ritornare fq: 90 LL: 35.9 uccidere fq: 6 LL: 8.3

processare fq: 26 LL: 15.6

unknown lemma unknown lemma

cicliamo fq: 2 LL: 3.3cicla fq: 2 LL: 3.3

0

splittare fq: 3 LL: 4.9

PERLTRIT: uccidere (un processo)(kill (a process))

PERLTRIT> [lem="uccidere"];1. <perlfaq8>: il segnale che ha <ucciso> il processo-->perloren: the signal the process died from 2. <perlfork>: <Uccidere> il processo genitore-->perloren: Killing the parent process 3. <perlfork>: genitore viene <ucciso>(usando la funzione kill( ) -->perloren: process is killed (either using Perl's kill( ) builtin4. <perlipc>: {HUP} ad 'IGNORE' per evitare di <uccidere> sé stesso)-->perloren: $ SIG{HUP} to IGNORE so it doesn't kill itself)5. <perlipc>: "fork( )" e "exec( )", ed <uccidere> i processi figli -->perloren: fork( ) and exec( ), and kill the errant child process.6. <perlthrtut>: probabilmente si bloccherà finché non lo <uccidete>.-->perloren: This program will probably hang until you kill it .

uccidere + inanimate object in itWaC3-01: musica (5, music), speranza (5, hope), amore (4, love), concorrenza (3, competition), innocenza (3, innocence), percezione (3, perception), realtà (3, reality), …

kill + inanimate object in ukWaC-01: game (14), process (2), security (2), NHS (2), soul (2), flu (2), time (2), …

PERLORIT: ritornare (selected)(return)

1. <corso>: testuale mentre exit <ritorna> solo un codice nume2. <Dalla_shell_al_web>: ript; <ritornando> poi la struttura re3. <frameperl>: Tale funzione <ritorna> 0 sei il comando è4. <frameperl>: exec che però non <ritorna> alcun valore. La5. <javaperl>: metodo / accept( )/ <ritorna> una istanza della6. <javaperl>: la funzione <ritornerebbe> un valore vero per7. <mb_corso_perl_5_print>: slash ( \ ) <ritorna> una reference8. <mostraLezione.php_puglisi>: iavi e le <ritorna> assemblate9. <Perl_Tutorial>: ) ; viene <ritornato> vero A dire il vero10.Perl_Tutorial>: L' espressione $cibo[ 2 ] <ritorna> uva.

NB: [lem="ritornare"] [pos="N.*"]

Fq PERLTRIT 0

Fq PERLORIT 16

Alternatives: restituire, produrre, …

Fq PERLORIT 90

Fq PERLTRIT 28

PERLTRIT: ritornare (selected) (return)

1. <scopo_dello_scope>: il seme, e <ritorna> il risultato2. <perlboot>: classe per <ritornare> a questo package.3. <perlembed>: esaminare i valori <ritornati>, avrete4. <perlfaq>: mai exec( ) non <ritorna>? Si possono fare5. <perlfaq6>: di matching <ritorna> le coppie che ha tr6. <perlfaq9>: he gli errori fatali <ritornino> al browser7. <perlfork>: processo; il figlio <ritorna> dalla fork( )8. <perlfunc>: di sistema e non <ritorna>, usate "system"9. <perlfunc>: ESPR return <Ritorna> da una subroutine ,10.<perlipc>: ostra FIFO. chdir; <ritorna> a casa $FIFO =

Fq PERLORIT 90

Fq PERLTRIT 28

NB: [lem="ritornare"] [pos="N.*"]

Fq PERLTRIT 0

Fq PERLORIT 16

Alternatives: restituire, produrre, …

PERLORIT: processare (selected)(process)

1. <coisson_puntata72>: nga adatta ad essere <processata> dalla shell dei 2. <eb_irc_check>: specificato , verrà <processato> dalla funzione on_l3. <e_solo_fortuna_printable>: codice viene <processato> con un foglio4. <introduzione_al_printable>: il software deve <processare> il testo5. <mb_corso_perl_10_print>: truzioni, essa <processa> tutti gli elementi6. <mb_corso_perl_10_print>: e di <processarlo> con il seguente cod7. <mod_perl1tutorial_print>: infatti <processerà> tutte le direttive8. <Perl_Tutorial>: che crei o comunque <processi> pagine html, sorge9. <sostituire_ma_c_printable>: il nostro script <processa>, invece di10.<tegels_usare_il_perl>: file di log viene <processata>. La variabile

Fq PERLORIT 26Fq PERLTRIT 5Alternatives: elaborare, manipolare…

PERLTRIT> [lem="processare"]; 1. <perlfaq8>: poiché la shell <processa> le redirezioni2. <perlfunc>: output vengono <processati> (consultate3. <perlfunc>: a finire in $var <processa> la lista degl4. <perlthrtut>: riato affinché venga <processato> . Una5. <perlvar>: routine per <processare> gli avvertimenti

Fq PERLORIT 26Fq PERLTRIT 5 Alternatives: elaborare, manipolare…

PERLTRIT: processare (process)

PERLORIT: ciclare (cicle)

PERLORIT> [word="cicl.*" & pos="V.*"];1. <coisson_puntata71>: inviati); ora <cicliamo> sull' array2. <garau_guida_perl> consente di <ciclare> un determinato blo3. <perl_tutorial_sciabarra>: il foreach <cicla> su un array e4. <sostituire_ma_c_printable>: Perl <cicla> linea per linea e5. <tegels_usare_il_perl>: aperto, <cicliamo> attraverso le sue

Fq PERLORIT 5Fq PERLTRIT 0Alternatives: iterare

PERLORIT: splittare split

PERLORIT> [word="splitt.*"];

1. <perl_valsesia>: in cui <splittare> il pattern.

2. <perl_valsesia>: si può voler <splittare> una linea

3. <soltanto_un_alt_printable>: <splittato> e passato

4. <Split_in_perl>: "<splittare>" cioè dividere una str

Fq PERLORIT 4Fq PERLTRIT 0Alternatives: dividere, separare

Summing up: calques

• The comparative analysis of key verbs in the original and in the translated subcorpora suggests that authors are more at ease with the use of English (technical) calques than translators.

2. -s words

1. Search for words ending in –s in original Italian and translated Italian (fq >1)

2. Select from output only plurals (unadapted borrowings) used (rather than quoted) in Italian discourse in the two sub corpora

3. Which corpus displays greater use of unadapted borrowings ending in –s?

Words ending in –s• 144 types• 1000 tokens

1. unless 852. this 603. bless 464. alias 395. exists 386. threads 377. Windows 368. warnings 349. Class 2410.vars 2411.…

• 95 types• 711 tokens

1. warnings 692. Windows 563. unless 544. Mongers385. Associates 316. keys 207. SomeClass 198. files 169. alias 1510.Class 1411.…

Search:[word="[a-zA-Z][a-zA-Z]+-?[a-zA-Z]?s"];

PERLORIT PERLTRIT

Results from the PERLIT corpusPERLORITWord fqfiles 16subroutines 10backquotes 6scripts 4forms 4links 4expressions 3cookies 3references 2

PERLTRIT

Word fq

backticks 2

closures 1

PERLORIT: “files”

perlorit

perltrit

PERLORIT: “forms”

perltrit

perlorit

PERLTRIT: closures and backticks

1. <perlmod>: riguardo alle chiusure [<closures>, N.d.T.].2. <perlref>: come le <closures> [ letteralmente " chiusure

1. <perlfaq8>: system( ) con quello dei <backticks> (`).2. <perlfaq8>: uscita). I <backticks> (``) lanciano il coma3. <perlfaq8>: shell, con i <backticks> ciò non è possibile.

Summing up: unadapted borrowings

• Despite superficial quantitative evidence (higher numbers of types and tokens for words ending in –s in translated than in original corpora), translators appear to disfavour unadapted borrowings ending in –s with respect to original authors

General conclusion

• Results of study 2 lend support to conclusions of study 1:– In both fiction translation and technical

translation,– Despite differences in translator profile,

translation “commission”, topic, genre, readership etc.,

– And regardless of differences in methodological design/object of corpus study…

General conclusions

• The law of growing standardization seems to predominate over the law of interference (in present-day translation practice between English and Italian etc. etc.)

• Two small steps toward the bottom-up identification of universal trends…

General conclusions

• The lessons to be learnt– Relying on superficial quantitative data in the

search for translation universals can be very misleading

– Insights and hypotheses should emerge from • the accumulation of results of (painstaking)

analyses • conducted on closely comparable corpora, • checked against their parallel text component(s)

and/or taking into account alternatives offered by the target language

Thank you

References

Pym, A. 2008. “On Toury's laws of how translators translate”. In Pym, A., M. Schlesinger and D. Simeoni (eds.). Beyoond Descriptive Translation Studies. Benjamins. 311-328.

Toury, G. 1995. Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Tirkkonen-Condit, S. 2004. “Unique items — over- or under-represented in translated language?”. In Mauranen, A. and P. Kujamäki (eds.), Translation Universals. Benjamins. 177–184.

Baker, M. 1993. “Corpus linguistics and translation studies. Implications and applications”. In Baker, M. G. Francis and E. Tognini-Bonelli (eds.). Text and Technology. Benjamins. 233-250.

Laviosa, S. 1998. “Core patterns of lexical use in a comparable corpus of English narrative prose”. Meta 43(4). 557-570.

Olohan, M. 2003. “How frequent are the contractions? A study of contracted forms in the translational English corpus”, Target 15(1):59-89.

Olohan, M. 2004. Introducing Corpora in Translation Studies. Routledge.

Recent critiques

“Baker (1995: 235), re-affirmed by Olohan (2004: 43), argues that translations can be studied by comparing them with non-translations in the same language, without focusing on source texts or source languages. This means we can describe translational English in opposition to non-translational English, doing all the research on English. The result is perhaps the major methodological advance associated with corpus studies. It has many economic advantages: it cuts out all the bother of learning foreign languages and cultures; it controls numerous tricky variables associated with suspicions of linguistic and cultural relativism. In the English-only research on optional that, there is thus strictly no way of knowing about any kind of foreign interference causing the frequencies of the linguistic variable, since in principle the source texts are not in the corpus”. [Pym 2008, p. 14 of pre-print version]