Translation Universals.pdf - ymerleksi - home

148 Vilma Pápai
(Sinclair 1991:13–36): variety in terms of geography (British, American and
Canadian authors), gender (male and female writers/translators) and status in
the community. The lack of a translation-driven corpus imposed constraints
especially in the selection of technical writing. Technical texts were included in
the corpus in the belief that they contain a higher number of cohesive links than
literary texts. Cohesive devices are the most frequently investigated text features
(see Table 1), and are likely to provide insights into the nature of explicitation.
The three sub-corpora consist of the first 100 sentences of each text taken
as representative of the texts as a whole in terms of the author’s and the
translator’s style as well as being typical of the genre.
In total, the corpus contains 2,400 sentences yielding approximately 45,000
running words. WordSmith Tools (Scott 1998) was applied to align the subcorpora
of the EHC and also to carry out analysis on the HHC.
3.2 Methods
This corpus is designed to cater for two different methods of analysis. Through
the investigation of the parallel corpus (EHC) I attempted to identify the explicitation
strategies, i.e. types of shifts used by the translators when rendering
English texts into Hungarian. In the procedure of identification the selection
criterion was wider than that of Blum-Kulka’s. Not only shifts in cohesion were
included on the list but instances with additional linguistic and extra-linguistic
information in addition to occurrences of ambiguous ST items rendered with
disambiguated TT items. The guiding principle was to find instances of modification
of ST, i.e. find steps towards an easy-to-understand, better structured,
better organized and disambiguated text.
This manual analysis would also tell us about the translation process of the
English → Hungarian translation direction. If we compare two languages, we
will arrive at a conclusion that is restricted to the two languages in question
and to the particular translation direction. If we intend to extend our claims, a
monolingual comparable corpus as a tool will provide insight into the nature
of translation and that of the translation product.
The second method of analysis serves this purpose. The procedure for this
was entirely different: unlike in the first stage, where explicitation strategies
were detected and analysed on a text-to-text basis, the second analysis looked
at explicitness as manifested in textual features of ‘large’ bodies of texts. In
addition, the investigation of the comparable corpus of translated and nontranslated
texts in Hungarian (HHC) was carried out with corpus methodology,
mainly by using frequency data. The focus of investigation here was