Rosa Rabadán is a Professor at the Department of Modern Languages at the University of León in Spain. Her areas of interest include translation theory, applied translation studies and corpus-based contrastive linguistics English-Spanish. Her publications have appeared in Babel, Languages in Contrast, Meta and TTR, among others, and she has contributed to several scholarly volumes in her areas of expertise. Her translations into Spanish include Gideon Toury’s Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond (with R. Merino, Cátedra) and Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (with J. L. Chamosa, Espasa). She is a co-leader of the research team ACTRES (Contrastive Analysis and Translation English-Spanish) and has been a Visiting Researcher at Ottawa, Canada, Brighton, U.K., and DCU, Ireland. She serves or has served as an advisory board member for Languages in Contrast, Linguistica Pragensia, BeLLS, Sendebar, MonTi and Benjamins Translation Library, among other editorial projects.

ABSTRACT

CORPORA, CONTRAST AND THIRD CODE: PATHS OF BI-/MULTILINGUAL RESEARCH

Corpus-based and computational research has yielded significant findings in contrastive linguistics and bi-/multilingual forms of text production, including translation. The integration of even the simplest computational algorithms and routines has profoundly impacted how we look at language and discourse. Corpora are the baseline of empirical linguistic research as they may accommodate different types of information, from basic part-of-speech to pragmatic and rhetorical annotation. Parallel, comparable translation and learners’ corpora offer distinct but complementary language data. They provide evidence to (dis)prove hypotheses formulated in linguistic models and contribute to more accurate language theories.

Three tracks are particularly productive in recent cross-linguistic research: contrastive linguistics, including rhetoric; third code studies (Frawley 1984) into the distinctiveness of translated language and discourse, and, related to both, bi-/multilingual text production, including translation. Third code studies have expanded beyond the documentation of universal tendencies of translated discourse to incorporate other variables, such as register (Kotze 2012), the context of mediation (Lanstyák and Heltai 2012; Kruger and Van Rooy 2016), and contrastive differences between languages (Zufferey 2016). The results have implications for translation, post-editing, and language technology. Text production is increasingly dependent on authoring support apps and controlled natural languages, presented to the non-linguist user as templates to be filled in with whatever linguistic content is available (Rabadán, Pizarro and Sanjurjo-González 2021). However, we can make a difference by providing expert linguistic knowledge. Analyzing empirical data and formulating them as metadata to be used by humans and computers alike can significantly contribute to all these areas (Daems, De Clercq and Macken 2017; Krüger 2020; Rabadán, Ramón and Sanjurjo-González 2021). This session will illustrate how this is being done and suggest possible research slots.

Keywords: Corpus, contrastive linguistics, third code, translation, text production

References

Daems, J., De Clercq, O., & Macken, L. 2017. Translationese and post-editese: How comparable is comparable quality? Linguistica Antverpiensia, New Series: Themes in Translation Studies, 16, 89–103.

Frawley, W. 1984. 'Prolegomenon to a theory of translation', in W. Frawley (ed.) Translation: Literary, Linguistic and Philosophical Perspectives, 159-175. London: Associated University Press.

Kotze, H. 2012. Register and the features of translated language. Across Languages and Cultures, 13, 33-65.

Kruger, H. & Van Rooy, G. 2016. Constrained language. A multidimensional analysis of translated English and a non-native indigenised variety of English. English World-Wide, 37(1), 26–57

Krüger, R. 2020. Explicitation in Neural Machine Translation, Across Languages and Cultures 21(2), 195-216. https://doi.org/10.1556/084.2020.00012

Lanstyák, I. & Heltai, P. 201). Universals in language contact and translation. Across Languages and Cultures 13(1), 99-121.

Rabadán, R., Pizarro, I. & Sanjurjo-González, H. 2021. Authoring support for Spanish language writers: A genre-restricted case study. RESLA, Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada/Spanish Journal of Applied Linguistics 34 (2) pp. 677–717.

Rabadán R., Ramón, N. & Sanjurjo-González, H. 2021 Pragmatic Annotation of a Domain-Restricted English-Spanish Comparable Corpus. Bergen Language and Linguistics Studies 11(1), 209-23.

Zufferey S. 2016. Discourse Connectives Across Languages. Factors Influencing Their Explicit or Implicit Translation. Languages in Contrast, vol. 16(2), 264-279.