BEHAVIORAL PROFILING IN

TRANSLATION STUDIES

Nina Szymor, University of Sheffield

Pilot study:

Corpus-based study of semantic differences

between translated and original Polish

Focus on deontic modality in legal Polish

Use of objective and precise methodology -

Behavioral Profiling (Divjak 2004; Divjak and Gries 2006, and later

work)

Background: translated vs non-translated

Previous work on translated and non-

translated texts (Baker 2004; Mauranen 2000; Berardini and

Ferraresi 2011; Dayrell 2008)

Systematic differences at syntactic, lexical and

discursive levels

Less interest in semantic differences

Background: modality

„…semantic domains that involve possibility and necessity as paradigmatic variants’ (van der

Auwera and Plungian 1998: 80)

Types of modality: dynamic, deontic, epistemic

Dynamic: That kid can sing like Frank Sinatra (Nuyts 2006: 2)

Deontic: You may come in now (Nuyts 2006: 5)

Epistemic: John may have arrived (van der Auwera and Plungian 1998: 81)

Background: deontic modality

Modals of obligation:

powinien (meaning „one should’)

musieć (meaning „to have to‟)

należy (meaning „it is required‟)

Background: methodology

Behavioral Profiling (Divjak and Gries 2006: 28): Corpus-based

Objective and precise

Manually annotated clues about a word (ID tags)

1. Formal characteristics

2. Semantic properties

Gathered data is analysed statistically

Study: corpora

Corpora used in the study:

1. NKJP National Corpus of Polish (legal subcorpus of

original Polish, 7 161 072 words, http://www.nkjp.pl/)

2. PELCRA English-Polish Parallel Corpora (legal

subcorpus of Polish translated from English, 28 571

342 words, http://pelcra.pl/)

Study: extracting sentences from corpora

NKJP (non-translated Polish)

musieć: 614 sentences

powinien: 6 807 sentences

należy: 5 321 sentences

PELCRA (Polish translated from English)

musieć: 28 556 sentences

powinien: 24 952 sentences

należy: 38 614 sentences

Study: extracting sentences from

corpora

0

200

400

600

800

1000

1200

1400

1600

musiec (pmw) powinien (pwm) nalezy (pmw)

NKJP (non-translated Polish)

PELCRA (translated Polish)

Study: annotation

Clause Type main OR subordinate

Subject

Structure grammatical OR compound OR block OR pronoun OR

logical OR implied

Animacy animate OR inanimate

Type 1 common OR proper

Type 2 abstract OR concrete

Modal Tense past OR present OR future

Mood indicative OR subjunctive

Infinitive

Aspect perfective OR imperfective OR non-paired

Voice active OR być-passive OR zostać-passive

Semantic

category (as in Divjak and Gries

2006)

physical OR physical other OR exchange/transfer OR

motion OR motion other OR speech OR intellectual

Study: statistical analysis

Chi-squared test and analysis of standardized

residuals – to check for differences between two

categorical variables:

1. Non-translated powinien and musieć

2. Non-translated and translated powinien

3. Non-translated and translated musieć

Study: behavioral profiles

(benchmarking)

Musieć both in main and subordinate clauses; subject mainly grammatical,

inanimate, common and abstract; modal mainly in present tense and indicative mood; infinitive mainly in active construction, both perfective and imperfective, mainly expressing physical action of the subject, but also physical action influencing the object.

Powinien main clauses; subject mainly grammatical, inanimate, common and

concrete; modal mainly in present tense and indicative mood; infinitive mainly in active constructions but być-passive also very common, both perfective and imperfective, mainly expressing physical action influencing the object, but also physical action of the subject

Study: behavioral profiles (comparing)

Non-translated vs translated musieć

Aspect:

perfective – more common in translated (56%) than in non-translated

(33.6%)

imperfective – less common in translated (28%) than in non-translated

(44%)

in translated texts, perfective is more common (56%) than imperfective

(28%)

Voice:

zostać-passive – more common in translated (18%) than non-translated

(3.2%)

Animacy:

animate – less common in translated (2.8%) than non-translated (20.8%)

Study: behavioral profiles (comparing)

Non-translated vs translated powinien

Aspect:

in translated texts, perfective is more common (55.2%) than imperfective

(31.2%)

Voice:

być-passive – less common in translated (20%) than non-translated

(39.5%)

zostać-passive – more common in translated (26.8%) than non-translated

(1.6%)

Subject type:

abstract – more common in translated (71.6%) than non-translated (24%)

concrete – less common in translated (24%) than non-translated (69.2%)

proper – more common in translated (15.6%) than non-translated (0%)

Conclusions

Significance of the results:

Previous studies suggest less chance to find perfective

infinitive with deontic modal in Polish (Divjak 2008)

This study suggests more chance to find perfective

infinitive with deontic modal in translated Polish

Why the difference?

Conclusions

Significance of the results:

Subject type preferences in powinien differ between

translated and non-translated texts

Subject animacy preferences in musieć differ between

translated and non-translated texts

Why this difference?

Bibliography

Baker, Mona (2004). “A Corpus-based View of Similarity and Difference in Translation.” International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 9 [2]: 167-193

Bernardini, S., & Ferraresi, A. (2011). Practice, Description and Theory Come Together: Normalization or Interference in Italian Technical Translation? Meta, 56(2), 226-246.

Dayrell, Carmen (2008), „Investigating the Preference of Translators for Recurrent Lexical Patterns: A Corpus-based Study‟ in trans-kom 1 (1), pp. 36-57, URL: http://www.trans-kom.eu/bd01nr01/trans-kom_01_01_04_Dayrell_Investigating_the_Preference.20080707.pdf (accessed on 20/01/2013)

Divjak, Dagmar (2004). Degrees of verb integration. Conceptualizing and categorizing events in Russian. Unpublished PhD dissertation, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium

Divjak, Dagmar (2008) „Modeling aspectual choice in Polish modal constructions. A corpus-based quest for the holy grail?‟ QITL 3, Helsinki (Finland), 2-4 June 2008.

Divjak, Dagmar S. & Stefan Th. Gries (2006). Ways of Trying in Russian. Clustering Behavioral Profiles. Journal of Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, 2 (1): 23-60

Mauranen, Anna (2000). “Strange Strings in Translated Language: A Study on Corpora.” Maeve Olohan (ed.): Intercultural Faultlines. Research Methods in Translation Studies I: Textual and Cognitive Aspects. Manchester: St Jerome, 105-118

NKJP National Corpus of Polish http://www.nkjp.pl/

Nuyts, J. (2006) Modality: „Overview and linguistic issues‟ in William Frawley (ed.) The Expression of Modality, pp. 1-26. Berlin, New York: Mouton de Gruyter

PELCRA English-Polish Parallel Corpora http://pelcra.pl/

Van der Auwera, Johan and Vladimir A. Plungian (1998) Modality‟s semantic map. Linguistic Typology 2: 79-124