This article introduces a corpus-based method for studying the realisation of ideology in translated and non-translated texts. The material comprises Russian-Finnish translations and original (non-translated) Finnish texts on Finnish political history. The analysis is based on a computer application of Firth's concept of keywords - “sociologically important words”. The article focuses on analysing one of the translation-specific keywords - the word ystävyys 'friendship'. The use of this word is analysed in word lists, collocations, word clusters, compounds, and actantial structure of the texts. The results show a clear difference between translations and non-translations in the use of the word ystävyys. The differences are manifest in the use of lexical patterns, such as the word ystävyys frequently collocating with the word ja 'and' or productively building word clusters and compounds in translations, but not in non-translations. The analysis of the keyword ystävyys in larger contexts shows that translations realise an actantial structure where the subject-hero consists of co-operating actors, who are aiming at a common goal of friendship. In non-translations, however, the acting subject functions alone, which explains the less frequent use of the word ystävyys. In contexts where this word occurs, it often takes a negative semantic prosody.
Introducing Corpora in Translation Studies: 1993-2003The introduction of corpora in Translation Studies was conceived within an empirical paradigm and came to be because of the convergence between the discovery and justification procedures put forward by Gideon Toury (1995/2012) for the study of translation and the data-driven approach developed by Corpus Linguistics for the study of languages. The synergy between Descriptive Translation Studies and Corpus Linguistics acted as a stimulus to the creation of a variety of corpus resources, the development of a descriptive research methodology and the growth of a line of enquiry that was put forward in the 1980s and gathered momentum thanks to the availability of corpora. This body of research is known as the quest for translation universals, which are posited as probabilistic laws of translational behaviour (Toury 1995/2012).One of the first corpus resources designed for contrastive linguistics and translation studies is the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus (ENPC). It was compiled at the University of Oslo under the direction of Stig Johansson and served as a model for the bidirectional parallel corpus of English and Portuguese, COMPARA.2 Another corpus design is the monolingual comparable corpus. An example is the Translational English Corpus (TEC).3 It was created at the University of Manchester under the direction of Mona Baker. Another example is the Corpus of Translated Finnish (CTF). It was compiled at the Savonlinna School of Translation Studies by Anna Mauranen's research group. The methodology adopted by CTS involves a helical progression from the elaboration of descriptive, interpretive and explanatory hypotheses to inferences about the non-observable culturally determined norms that govern translators' choices.Initially, research focused on four universals: simplification, explicitation, the law of growing standardization (largely compatible with normalization) and the law of interference. Simplification is "the process and/or result of making do with less words" (Blum-Kulka and Levenston 1983: 119). Explicitation is "an observed cohesive explicitness from SL to TL texts regardless of the increase traceable to differences between the linguistic and textual systems involved" (Blum-Kulka 1986: 19). The law of growing standardization posits that "in translation, textual relations obtaining in the original are often modified, sometimes to the point of being totally ignored, in favour of [more] habitual options offered by a target repertoire" (Toury 1995(Toury /2012. The law of interference states that "in translation, phenomena pertaining to the make-up of the source text tend to force themselves on the translators and be transferred to the target text" (Toury 1995(Toury / 2012. In sum, during the first decade of its life, CTS built upon, refined, extended, and diversified previous research into the regularities of translational language.Meanwhile, corpora were making inroads into Applied Translation Studies. In this area of research and practice, corpor...
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