Research based on translation expertise, which is also sometimes referred to as translation competence, has been a growing area of investigation in translation studies. These studies have not only focused on how translation expertise may be conceptualised and defined, but also on how this expertise is acquired and developed by translators. One of the key observations that arise from an overview of current research in the field of translation expertise is the prevalence of process-oriented methodologies in the field, with product-oriented methodologies used comparatively infrequently. This study is based on the assumption that product-oriented methodologies, and specifically the corpus-based approach, may provide new insights into translation expertise. The study therefore sets out to address the lack of comprehensive and systematic corpus-based analyses of translation expertise. One of the foremost concerns of corpus-based translation studies has been the investigation of what is known as the features of translated language which are often categorised as: explicitation, simplification, normalisation and levelling-out. The main objective of this study is to investigate the hypothesis that the features of translated language can be taken as an index of translation expertise. The hypothesis is founded on the premise that if the features of translated language are considered to be the textual traces of translation strategies, then the different translation strategies associated with different levels of translation expertise will be reflected in different frequencies and distributions of these features of translated language in the work of experienced and inexperienced translators. The study therefore aimed to determine if there are significant differences in the frequency and distribution of the features of translated language in the work of experienced and inexperienced translators. As background to this main research question, the study also investigated a secondary hypothesis in which translated language demonstrates unique features that are the consequence of various aspects of the translation process. A custom-built comparable English corpus was used for the study, comprising three subcorpora: translations by experienced translators, translations by inexperienced translators, and non-translations. A selection of linguistic operationalization’s was chosen for each of the four features of translated language. The differences in the frequency and distribution of these linguistic operationalization’s in the three sub corpora were analysed by means of parametric or non-parametric ANOVA. The findings of the study provide some support for both hypotheses. In terms of the translation expertise hypothesis, some of the features of translated language demonstrate significantly different frequencies in the work of experienced translators compared to the work of inexperienced translators. It was found that experienced translators are less explicit in terms of: formal completeness, simplify less frequently because they use a more varied vocabulary, use longer sentences and have a lower readability index score on their translations, and use contractions more frequently, which signals that they normalise less than inexperienced translators. However, experienced translators also use neologisms and loanwords less frequently than inexperienced translators, which is suggestive of normalisation occurring more often in the work of experienced translators when it comes to lexical creativity. These linguistic differences are taken as indicative of the different translation strategies used by the two groups of translators. It is believed that the differences are primarily caused by variations in experienced and inexperienced translators‟ sensitivity to translation norms, their awareness of written language conventions, their language competence (which involves syntactic, morphological and vocabulary knowledge), and their sensitivity to register. Furthermore, it was also found that there are indeed significant differences between translated and non-translated language, which also provides support for the second hypothesis investigated in this study. Translators explicitate more frequently than non-translators in terms of formal completeness, tend to have a less extensive vocabulary, tend to raise the overall formality of their translations, and produce texts that are less creative and more conformist than non-translators‟ texts. However, statistical support is lacking for the hypothesis that translators explicitate more at the propositional level than original text producers do, as well as for the hypothesis that translators are inclined to use a more neutral middle register. / MA (Language Practice), North-West University, Vaal Triangle Campus, 2013

<p>For the purpose of this descriptive translation study, a translation corpus was built from roughly the first 20,000 words of each of the first four Harry Potter books by J.K. Rowling, and their respective translations into Swedish. I*Link, a new type of word alignment tool, was used to align the samples on a word level and to investigate and analyse the aligned corpus. The purpose of the study was threefold: to investigate manifestations of translation universals, to search for evidence of translator development and to study the efficiency of different strategies for using the alignment tools.</p><p>The results show that all three translation universals were manifested in the corpus, both on a general pattern level and on a more specific lexical level. Additionally, a clear pattern of translator development was discovered, showing that there are differences between the four different samples. The tendency is that the translations become further removed from the original texts, and this difference occurs homogeneously and sequentially. In the word alignment, four different ways of using the tools were tested, and one strategy was found to be more efficient than the others. This strategy uses dynamic resources from previous alignment sessions as input to I*Trix, an automatic alignment tool, and the output file is manually post-edited in I*Link.</p><p>In conclusion, the study shows how new tools and methods can be used in descriptive translation studies to extract information that is not readily obtainable with traditional tools and methods.</p>

Research based on translation expertise, which is also sometimes referred to as translation competence, has been a growing area of investigation in translation studies. These studies have not only focused on how translation expertise may be conceptualised and defined, but also on how this expertise is acquired and developed by translators. One of the key observations that arise from an overview of current research in the field of translation expertise is the prevalence of process-oriented methodologies in the field, with product-oriented methodologies used comparatively infrequently. This study is based on the assumption that product-oriented methodologies, and specifically the corpus-based approach, may provide new insights into translation expertise. The study therefore sets out to address the lack of comprehensive and systematic corpus-based analyses of translation expertise. One of the foremost concerns of corpus-based translation studies has been the investigation of what is known as the features of translated language which are often categorised as: explicitation, simplification, normalisation and levelling-out. The main objective of this study is to investigate the hypothesis that the features of translated language can be taken as an index of translation expertise. The hypothesis is founded on the premise that if the features of translated language are considered to be the textual traces of translation strategies, then the different translation strategies associated with different levels of translation expertise will be reflected in different frequencies and distributions of these features of translated language in the work of experienced and inexperienced translators. The study therefore aimed to determine if there are significant differences in the frequency and distribution of the features of translated language in the work of experienced and inexperienced translators. As background to this main research question, the study also investigated a secondary hypothesis in which translated language demonstrates unique features that are the consequence of various aspects of the translation process. A custom-built comparable English corpus was used for the study, comprising three subcorpora: translations by experienced translators, translations by inexperienced translators, and non-translations. A selection of linguistic operationalization’s was chosen for each of the four features of translated language. The differences in the frequency and distribution of these linguistic operationalization’s in the three sub corpora were analysed by means of parametric or non-parametric ANOVA. The findings of the study provide some support for both hypotheses. In terms of the translation expertise hypothesis, some of the features of translated language demonstrate significantly different frequencies in the work of experienced translators compared to the work of inexperienced translators. It was found that experienced translators are less explicit in terms of: formal completeness, simplify less frequently because they use a more varied vocabulary, use longer sentences and have a lower readability index score on their translations, and use contractions more frequently, which signals that they normalise less than inexperienced translators. However, experienced translators also use neologisms and loanwords less frequently than inexperienced translators, which is suggestive of normalisation occurring more often in the work of experienced translators when it comes to lexical creativity. These linguistic differences are taken as indicative of the different translation strategies used by the two groups of translators. It is believed that the differences are primarily caused by variations in experienced and inexperienced translators‟ sensitivity to translation norms, their awareness of written language conventions, their language competence (which involves syntactic, morphological and vocabulary knowledge), and their sensitivity to register. Furthermore, it was also found that there are indeed significant differences between translated and non-translated language, which also provides support for the second hypothesis investigated in this study. Translators explicitate more frequently than non-translators in terms of formal completeness, tend to have a less extensive vocabulary, tend to raise the overall formality of their translations, and produce texts that are less creative and more conformist than non-translators‟ texts. However, statistical support is lacking for the hypothesis that translators explicitate more at the propositional level than original text producers do, as well as for the hypothesis that translators are inclined to use a more neutral middle register. / MA (Language Practice), North-West University, Vaal Triangle Campus, 2013

For the purpose of this descriptive translation study, a translation corpus was built from roughly the first 20,000 words of each of the first four Harry Potter books by J.K. Rowling, and their respective translations into Swedish. I*Link, a new type of word alignment tool, was used to align the samples on a word level and to investigate and analyse the aligned corpus. The purpose of the study was threefold: to investigate manifestations of translation universals, to search for evidence of translator development and to study the efficiency of different strategies for using the alignment tools. The results show that all three translation universals were manifested in the corpus, both on a general pattern level and on a more specific lexical level. Additionally, a clear pattern of translator development was discovered, showing that there are differences between the four different samples. The tendency is that the translations become further removed from the original texts, and this difference occurs homogeneously and sequentially. In the word alignment, four different ways of using the tools were tested, and one strategy was found to be more efficient than the others. This strategy uses dynamic resources from previous alignment sessions as input to I*Trix, an automatic alignment tool, and the output file is manually post-edited in I*Link. In conclusion, the study shows how new tools and methods can be used in descriptive translation studies to extract information that is not readily obtainable with traditional tools and methods.

Title: Translated Czech and Its Characteristics Author: Mgr. Lucie Chlumská Department: Institute of the Czech National Corpus Supervisor: doc. Mgr. Václav Cvrček, Ph.D. Abstract: Despite the fact that translated literature accounts for more than one third of all written publications in the Czech Republic, Czech in translations has not yet been systematically analyzed from a quantitative point of view. The main objective of this corpus-based dissertation is to identify characteristic features of translated Czech com- pared to Czech in original, i.e. non-translated texts. The analysis was based on a large monolingual comparable corpus Jerome, created for the purposes of this study. It inclu- des both fiction and non-fiction texts and its design reflects the real Czech situation regarding the translations' source languages, i.e. translations from English prevail. The research was inspired by the theory of translation universals (typical linguistic featu- res common to any translated text) and focused mainly on simplification, convergence and general frequency characteristics, including parts-of-speech distribution and n-gram analysis. The findings have supported the hypothesis that translated Czech, as reflected in the Jerome corpus, is different from the non-translated Czech in terms of higher degree of...

Mit Versprechungen von teils enormen Produktivitätssteigerungen bei mindestens gleicher Qualität im Vergleich zu Humanübersetzungen hat Post-Editing über die Jahre zunehmend an Relevanz gewonnen und ist heute aus der Übersetzungslandschaft nicht mehr wegzudenken. Neben zahllosen Qualitäts- und Produktivitätsstudien gab es vereinzelt Bemühungen, mögliche linguistische Unterschiede zwischen posteditierten und humanübersetzten Texten („Post-Editese“ nach Daems et al 2017) zu untersuchen. So stellte Toral (2019) fest, dass posteditierte Texte bestimmte Merkmale übersetzter Texte („Translationese“ nach Gellerstam, 1986), nicht nur aufweisen, sondern dass diese signifikant häufiger in posteditierten Texten vorzufinden seien. Insofern sei Post-Editese eine verschärfte Form der Translationese. Allerdings hat das Forschungsfeld der Post-Editese vergleichsweise wenig Aufmerksamkeit erfahren und in den meisten Korpusanalysen wurden Zeitungsartikel oder Texte aus dem Bereich general language untersucht, obwohl sich ein Großteil des Übersetzungsbedarfs im Bereich der Fachtexte und Language for Specific Purposes verorten lässt. Um dieses Desiderat zu bearbeiten, wird an die Vorarbeit von Toral angeknüpft und anhand eines Fachtextkorpus untersucht, ob sich seine These für die Translationese-Merkmale Simplification und Interference anhand von Ausschnitten aus technischen und medizinischen Fachtexten und den dazugehörigen Übersetzungen bestätigen lässt. Das Korpus besteht aus 75 Korpustexten des Sprachenpaars Englisch-Deutsch, darunter 6 Ausgangstexte und 69 Übersetzungen der Modi MÜ, LPE, FPE und HÜ. Die Methodik von Toral (2019) und Lapshinova-Koltunski (2013) wird in adaptierter Form und unter Zuhilfenahme der Sprachanalyse-Software Sketch Engine angewendet. Simplification soll anhand der lexikalischen Dichte und lexikalischen Diversität (Type-Token-Ratio, TTR) nachgewiesen werden. Das Verhältnis Nominalität/Verbalität und das Satzlängenverhältnis zwischen AT und ZT werden zum Nachweis von Interference herangezogen. Die Ergebnisse lassen weder zu Simplification noch zu Interference eindeutige Schlüsse zu: Während der TTR in posteditierten Texten wie erwartet geringer ist als in humanübersetzten Texten, d. h. die posteditierten Texte weniger lexikalisch divers sind als die humanübersetzten, ist die lexikalische Dichte in den posteditierten Texten entgegen der Hypothese höher als in den humanübersetzten Texten. Die Satzlängenverhältnisse zwischen AT und ZT sind in den posteditierten Texten tatsächlich ähnlicher als bei den Humanübersetzungen, was entsprechend der aufgestellten Hypothese auf mehr Interference des AT in den posteditierten Texten hindeutet. Die Ergebnisse zu den Verhältnissen von Nominalität/Verbalität jedoch konnten aufgrund von mutmaßlichen Verzerrungen durch Sprachsystemunterschiede im Bereich der Kompositabildung nicht sinnvoll ausgewertet werden. Durch die geringe Korpusgröße und die geringe Länge der Korpustexte wirken sich bereits einzelne idiosynkratische Entscheidungen auf Einzeltextebene, etwa bei der Satzsegmentierung oder bei der Terminologie, stark auf das Gesamtergebnis aus. Insofern zeigt sich, dass Besonderheiten auf Einzeltextebene in künftigen quantitativen Korpusanalysen, insbesondere in solchen mit größeren Korpora, stärker berücksichtigt werden sollten. Torals These, Post-Editese sei eine verschärfte Form der Translationese, konnte im Rahmen dieser Arbeit folglich nicht eindeutig bestätigt werden.:1 Einleitung 1.1 Herleitung 1.2 Ziel der Arbeit 1.3 Aufbau der Arbeit 2 Hintergrund 2.1 Post-Editing 2.1.1 Definition 2.1.2 Arten von Post-Editing 2.1.3 Produktivitäts- und Kostenvorteile 2.1.4 Qualitätsanalysen 2.1.5 Einflussfaktoren auf die Qualität des MÜ-Outputs 2.1.6 Präferenz- und Akzeptanzstudien 2.1.7 Einstellungen von Übersetzern, Sprachdienstleistern und Kunden 2.1.8 Weitere Forschungsrichtungen 2.2 Translationese 2.2.1 Definition 2.2.2 Übersetzungsuniversalien nach Baker 2.2.3 Interference nach Toury bzw. Teich 2.2.4 Forschungsstand 2.2.5 Neuere Forschungsrichtungen 2.3 Post-Editese 2.3.1 Definition 2.3.2 Forschungsstand 2.4 Zwischenfazit und Forschungsdesiderat 3 Daten und Methoden 3.1 Korpus 3.1.1 Beschreibung der Korpustexte 3.1.2 Erstellung des Korpus 3.1.3 Begründung der Auswahl des Korpus 3.1.4 Aufbereitung der Korpustexte für die maschinelle Auswertung 3.2 Analysemethoden 3.2.1 Simplification 3.2.2 Interference 4 Ergebnisse der eigenen Korpusanalyse und Einordnung der Ergebnisse 4.1 Simplification 4.1.1 Lexikalische Diversität 4.1.2 Lexikalische Dichte 4.1.3 Einordnung der Ergebnisse zu Simplification 4.2 Interference 4.2.1 Verhältnis der Verhältnisse von nominalen und verbalen Wortarten zwischen AT und ZT 4.2.2 Verhältnis der Satzlängen zwischen AT und ZT 4.2.3 Einordnung der Ergebnisse zu Interference 5 Diskussion 6 Fazit und Ausblick 7 Literaturverzeichnis / Promising moderate to sharp increases in productivity while achieving quality that is at least on par with human translation, post-editing has increasingly gained in importance in recent years and has become an integral part of the translation landscape. Aside from countless studies on productivity and quality, there have been isolated efforts to examine possible linguistic differences between postedited texts and human translations (“post-editese” according to Daems et al, 2017). Toral (2019) observed that postedited texts not only exhibit certain characteristics of translated texts (“translationese” according to Gellerstam, 1986), but that they exhibit them to a significantly higher degree compared with human translations. This prompted Toral to describe post-editese as an “exacerbated translationese”. However, research into post-editese has received relatively little attention and most corpus studies have focused on newspaper articles or so-called general language, despite the fact that most of professional translation takes place in the domain of Language for Specific Purposes. In order to address this desideratum, this work builds on Toral’s research. A corpus of technical texts is used to examine whether his thesis can be confirmed for simplification and interference, two well-known translationese characteristics, when relying on text excerpts from the technical and medical domain and their corresponding translations. The corpus consists of 75 texts in total, made up of 6 English source texts and 69 corresponding German translations produced via MT, LPE, FPE and HT. The analysis relies on an adapted form of Toral’s (2019) and Lapshinova-Koltunski’s (2013) methods and makes use of the text analysis software Sketch Engine. The parameters lexical density and lexical variety (type-token ratio, TTR) are used to identify simplification, whereas the nominality/verbality ratio and sentence length ratio between source and target text are interpreted as evidence for interference. The results are inconclusive for both simplification and interference. While the TTR is, as per the hypothesis, lower in the postedited texts, i. e. while the postedited texts are less lexically varied compared with the human translations, the lexical density of the postedited texts is higher than that of the human translations, which contradicts the hypothesis. The sentence length ratios between source and target texts are more similar in the postedited texts compared with human translations, confirming the hypothesis that postedited texts show more interference from their source text. The results for the nominality/verbality ratio, however, could not be interpreted in any meaningful way, as distortions due to differences in the language systems with respect to compounding likely play a role. Given the small corpus size and the short length of the corpus texts, even isolated, idiosyncratic decisions at the individual text level, e.g. in regards to sentence segmentation and terminology seem to have a major impact on the total result. This shows that peculiarities at the individual text level need to be considered more carefully in future quantitative corpus studies, in particular when dealing with larger corpora. Consequently, Toral’s thesis of post-editese being an exacerbated form of translationese could not definitively be confirmed within this work.:1 Einleitung 1.1 Herleitung 1.2 Ziel der Arbeit 1.3 Aufbau der Arbeit 2 Hintergrund 2.1 Post-Editing 2.1.1 Definition 2.1.2 Arten von Post-Editing 2.1.3 Produktivitäts- und Kostenvorteile 2.1.4 Qualitätsanalysen 2.1.5 Einflussfaktoren auf die Qualität des MÜ-Outputs 2.1.6 Präferenz- und Akzeptanzstudien 2.1.7 Einstellungen von Übersetzern, Sprachdienstleistern und Kunden 2.1.8 Weitere Forschungsrichtungen 2.2 Translationese 2.2.1 Definition 2.2.2 Übersetzungsuniversalien nach Baker 2.2.3 Interference nach Toury bzw. Teich 2.2.4 Forschungsstand 2.2.5 Neuere Forschungsrichtungen 2.3 Post-Editese 2.3.1 Definition 2.3.2 Forschungsstand 2.4 Zwischenfazit und Forschungsdesiderat 3 Daten und Methoden 3.1 Korpus 3.1.1 Beschreibung der Korpustexte 3.1.2 Erstellung des Korpus 3.1.3 Begründung der Auswahl des Korpus 3.1.4 Aufbereitung der Korpustexte für die maschinelle Auswertung 3.2 Analysemethoden 3.2.1 Simplification 3.2.2 Interference 4 Ergebnisse der eigenen Korpusanalyse und Einordnung der Ergebnisse 4.1 Simplification 4.1.1 Lexikalische Diversität 4.1.2 Lexikalische Dichte 4.1.3 Einordnung der Ergebnisse zu Simplification 4.2 Interference 4.2.1 Verhältnis der Verhältnisse von nominalen und verbalen Wortarten zwischen AT und ZT 4.2.2 Verhältnis der Satzlängen zwischen AT und ZT 4.2.3 Einordnung der Ergebnisse zu Interference 5 Diskussion 6 Fazit und Ausblick 7 Literaturverzeichnis

This thesis is focused on testing the so-called unique items hypothesis on Czech language data. Supposed Czech unique items were chosen from lexical units, word-formation phenomena, syntactic structures and language use phenomena. Their frequency in a comparable monolingual corpus of contemporary Czech was established and the differences in frequency were statistically tested. This quantitative research was accompanied by a qualitative probe into the English source texts from which sentences containing selected unique items were translated using an aligned parallel corpus of English-Czech translations. The results reveal a general tendency of unique items to be underrepresented in translated language and a variety of source- language phenomena that underlie unique items usage in the target language.

Meaning has been established pervasively as a central concept throughout disciplines that were involved in cognitive revolution. Its metaphoric usage comes to be, first and foremost, through the interpreter’s constraint: representational relationships and contents are considered to be in the “eye” or mind of the observer and shared properties among observers themselves are knowable through interlinguistic phenomena, such as translation. Despite the instability of meaning in relation to its underdetermination by reference, it can be a tertium comparationis or “third comparator” for extended human cognition if gauged through invariants that exist in transfer processes such as translation, as all languages and cultures are rooted in pan-human experience and, thus, share and express species-specific ontology. Meaning, seen as a cognitive competence, does not stop outside of the body but extends, depends, and partners with other agents and the environment. A novel approach for exploring the transfer properties of some constituent items of the original natural semantic metalanguage in English, that is, semantic primitives, is presented: FrameNet’s semantic frames, evoked by the primes SEE and FEEL, were extracted from EuroParl, a parallel corpus that allows for the automatic word alignment of items with their synonyms. Large Ontology Multilingual Extraction was used. Afterward, following the Semantic Mirrors Method, a procedure that consists back-translating into source language, a translatological examination of translated and original versions of items was performed. A fully automated pipeline was designed and tested, with the purpose of exploring associated frame shifts and, thus, beginning a research agenda on their alleged universality as linguistic features of translation, which will be complemented with and contrasted against further massive feedback through a citizen science approach, as well as cognitive and neurophysiological examinations. Additionally, an embodied account of frame semantics is proposed.

This study examines the translation of hyphenated compounds from English to Swedish in a non-fiction text about fashion. The translation is performed by the author of this study, which is important to keep in mind. The aim is to evaluate the structure and function of hyphenated compounds and analyze if and what changes occur in the translation process. The quantitative analysis demonstrates that the majority of the hyphenated compounds function as adjectives in the source text, and the most frequent left-hand elements are adjectives and nouns, while the most frequent right-hand elements are nouns and -ed participles. An overview of the translation equivalents in the target text reveals compound participles, compound adjectives, and prepositional phrases as the most common structural categories. The qualitative analysis illustrates how general methods like transposition, modulation, and literal translations are necessary in order to produce appropriate translations. Furthermore, translation universals, especially in the form of explicitation and simplification, prove to be prominent strategies when translating hyphenated compounds. Explicitation is particularly evident when hyphenated compounds are rendered as postmodifying prepositional phrases, clauses, and noun phrases, while simplification is especially notable in the category of simple adjectives. In addition, a noteworthy finding that stands out compared to previous studies is how some hyphenated compounds are kept in their hyphenated form when translated, which appears to correlate with the genre of fashion writing.

This thesis aims to elucidate the translation process by devising a way of retrieving evidence of this process from its output. It further aims to assess the claims made by some scholars concerning the possible existence of Translation Universals. In order to isolate the interaction of texts and contexts, a corpus of American short stories was created, with their translations into Persian published after the 1979 Revolution. Three complementary methodologies gave a rounded picture: (1) Corpus-based Descriptive Translation Studies; (2) The pragmatic and rhetorically-based approach of Thinking Translation devised at St Andrews; and ‎(3) The analytical framework mostly established by Halliday in his Systemic Functional Grammar.‎ Approaching the process of translation in the specific order devised in this thesis provided four vantage points to analyse the data in a systematic way from linguistic, discourse, cultural and literary views before reaching what are at once the most personal and most characteristic aspects of a translator's work. The research begins with a literature review of the field and an account of linguistic constraints and of all Translation Universals hypothesised so far, followed by an extensive analysis of data in two consecutive chapters. With reference to the choices made in this corpus, it is discussed in the Conclusions chapter that most of the Translation Universals so far claimed are not in fact universal. It is the role of the translator which has emerged as the determining factor in producing a translated text, and thus as the key to resolving the issues explored in this thesis. It seems there are no constraints beyond the translator's reach, and there are no parameters which do not involve the translator, who introduces his or her own choices, or manipulates certain parameters. Only when they have done so, will the translation, as both process and product, be accomplished.