Translation Universals.pdf - ymerleksi - home

110 Jarmo Harri Jantunen
Figure 2. The span. “L” strands for the left and “R” for the right side, the numbers
mark the distance from the node. (An approximate translation in brackets.)
context. This Keyword in Context (KWIC) analysis is utilised to extract the
immediate colligates and collocates of node words. After the relevant concordance
lines (i.e. lines which include the node) are extracted from the corpus,
they are sorted manually according to the word class in a given position. The
span is limited to the space of two words to the left and two words to the right
of the node. However, not only the words are counted but also the clause beginnings
or ends, which could turn to be distinctive parameters in the analysis
(see Figure 2).
3.2 Statistical procedures employed to analyse the similarity and difference
On the grounds that “one can never be entirely sure that the observed differences
between two groups of data have not arisen by chance due to the inherent
variability in the data” (Oakes 1998:1), I have adopted a number of statistical
procedures to avoid misconstructions of the data. The chi-square (x 2 )test 7
(Butler 1985; Oakes 1998) is used to test the significance of observed frequencies
in different subcorpora. Furthermore, statistical methods are used to test
the significance and strength of collocations. To measure the significance, there
are several tests available, of which z-andt-scores and Mutual Information (I)
are the most commonly used (Barnbrook 1996:94–100; for the range of tests,
see also Oakes 1998).
According to Barnbrook, it can be difficult or even impossible to select
one test that best evaluates the significance of the collocation in question
(ibid. 101). This view is shared by Stubbs (1995), who claims that tests can be
confusing and they must be interpreted with care. Both Stubbs and Barnbrook
suggest that to achieve a balance between different tests it is probably better to
use more than one statistical measure. In his analysis, Barnbrook (ibid. 100–
101) reports that the three tests mentioned above provide different kinds of
information on the significance of collocations: while both the z-score and the
Mutual Information measures underline the significance of low frequency co-