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Untypical patterns in translations 123
of one source language on the MuCTF – could one source language, or source
languages belonging to the same language group, distort the distributions of
collocational and colligational pattern, no matter how normally distributed
the degree modifiers are in the corpus? And could we obtain different results
for source language impact, if the source language was other than English in
MoCTF? These questions cannot be answered in the current paper, but could
be analysed in future research.
Notes
1. The concept of translation universal is used here knowing the criticism which it has
met (e.g. Tymoczko 1998). It is used as a general concept referring to possible wide-spread
tendencies in translations accepting that its manifestations might not concern all languages
or language pairs at any given time and place.
2. See especially Tables 7.2 and 7.4.
3. According to Sinclair (1996:94), the investigation of word meaning requires not only
the analysis of collocational and colligational patterns, but also the description of semantic
preferences and prosodies, which also have a central role in language description. The
contextual semantic categories are not, however, included in the present analysis.
4. Furthermore, also the morphological features (such as comparative and superlative
forms) seem to differentiate these nearly synonymous words.
5. In 1999, the proportion of English among all source languages was as high as 69 per cent,
and it seems that it will grow in the future (Minkkinen 2001).
6. WordSmith Tools is available at: http://www.lexically.net/wordsmith/
7. x 2 = Σ (O – E) 2 /E, where O = observed frequency and E = expected frequency (Butler
1985:113; Oakes 1998:25).
8. t =(O–E)/ √ O, where O = observed frequency and E = expected frequency (Barnbrook
1996:97).
9. I =log 2 (O / E), where O = observed frequency and E = expected frequency (Barnbrook
1996:98).
10. z=(p 1 –p 2 )/ √ p p (1 – p p )(1/N 1 + 1/N 2 ),wherep=proportionofitemsandN=sample
size (Butler 1985:94).
11. Degree modifiers have also been called adverbs of degree (Bäcklund 1973; Klein 1998),
intensifiers (Bolinger 1972) or simply adverbs (Quirk et al. 1985). They can modify, at least in
English, not only the word classes named here but also verbs, pronouns, and nouns (Quirk
et al 1985; Altenberg1991).
12. Paradis (1997) has studied only spoken English. We must, of course, keep in mind that
the distribution of degree modifiers may vary across genres and registers.