A Corpus-based Study of Translation Universals in English Translations of Korean Newspaper Texts

Gwang-Yoon Goh; Younghee Cheri Lee (Cheri J. Lee)

doi:10.21049/ccs.2016.45..109

This article examines distinctive linguistic shifts of translational English in an effort to verify the validity of the translation universals hypotheses, including simplification, explicitation, normalization and leveling-out, which have been most heavily explored to date. A large-scale study involving comparable corpora of translated and non-translated English newspaper texts has been carried out to typify particular linguistic attributes inherent in translated texts. The main findings are as follows. First, by employing the parameters of STTR, top-to-bottom frequency words, and mean values of sentence lengths, the translational instances of simplification have been detected across the translated English newspaper corpora. In contrast, the portion of function words produced contrary results, which in turn suggests that this feature might not constitute an effective test of the hypothesis. Second, it was found that the use of connectives was more salient in original English newspaper texts than translated English texts, being incompatible with the explicitation hypothesis. Third, as an indicator of translational normalization, lexical bundles were found to be more pervasive in translated texts than in non-translated texts, which is expected from and therefore support the normalization hypothesis. Finally, the standard deviations of both STTR and mean sentence lengths turned out to be higher in translated texts, indicating that the translated English newspaper texts were less leveled out within the same corpus group, which is opposed to what the leveling-out hypothesis postulates. Overall, the results suggest that not all four hypotheses may qualify for the label translation universals, or at least that some translational predictors are not feasible enough to evaluate the effectiveness of the translation universals hypotheses.

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