Translationese and punctuation: An empirical study of translated and non-translated international newspaper articles (English and Spanish)

This paper analyzes the comparative usage of punctuation marks in translated (English>Spanish) and non-translated newspaper articles. Excerpts were extracted from the online International News sections published in the US and Mexico by Reuters and the Associated Press. Hypothesis testing and corpus-based descriptive statistics were used to study the frequency of usage of punctuation marks, such as commas, periods, colons, semicolons, en-dashes and em-dashes, as well as sentence length, in translated and non-translated texts in the context of journalistic writing. Results from the analysis reveal a tendency to carry over periods, colons and em-dashes from English source texts into translated Spanish texts, producing a source language residual effect or ‘translationese.’ Data gathered from concordancing tools also suggest a residual effect in the usage of commas and semicolons, as well as in sentencing. These results reflect, among other factors, a lack of adherence to style guide conventions.