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Revisiting the Concept of “Translationese” based on Corpus Analysis

Choi, Heekyung 1

1고려대학교 KU-MU 통번역과정

Accredited

ABSTRACT

In translation studies as well as in the public discourse, “translationese” usually refers to awkward or ungrammatical linguistic features resulting from the process of translation. In other words, the phenomenon of translationese has been mostly discussed from the perspective of quality assessment and improvement within the context of translation. Ironically, however, typical features of translationese are observed not only in translated texts but in non-translated texts; thus, they need to be explored from a broader perspective. To this end, the present study analyzes two examples of Korean translationese for two English prepositions, from and through, in the corpora of translated and non-translated Korean news magazine articles compiled by the author. The findings of this study show that translationese is not always more distinct in translation than in non-translation, as opposed to conventional theories. Translators were found to have a tendency to use alternatives to translationese expressions for the majority of the two prepositions observed in the source texts. To explain the implications of the findings, this study suggests that the concept of translationese should be revisited from the viewpoint of contact linguistics.

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.