1887
Volume 2, Issue 1
  • ISSN 2799-6190
  • E-ISSN: 2799-8592

Abstract

The study investigated the hypothesis of normalization and stylistic variation across translators as manifested in the use of lexical bundles between translated and non-translated English literary texts. Normalization is a hypothesis originally proposed as ‘conservatism’ by Baker (1996) which states that the translator tends to conform to linguistic patterns and conventions typical of the target language even to the point of exaggeration, and lexical bundles are sequences of three or four words recurring with high frequency in natural discourse. The study was carried out in two stages. The first stage replicated previous studies that relied on simple frequency tests to confirm the normalization hypothesis. Contrary to these earlier studies, the present study’s frequency tests on lexical bundles failed to provide clear support for the normalization hypothesis. The second stage employed two types of multivariate exploratory analysis, principal component analysis (PCA) and hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA), to examine the underlying relationships among individual texts, lexical bundles, and translated and non-translated group categories. Following the failed frequency tests, it was hypothesized here that normalization might be still present in the translated corpus but restricted by types of lexical bundles. PCA confirmed this hypothesis by revealing that normalization occurred in the use of a particular functional type of lexical bundles, called discourse bundles, which are relatively free from the thematic content of the text in which they occur. This ascertains the traditional idea that statistical tests of translation hypotheses must deal with linguistic features unrelated to the thematic content of the corpus. Additionally, PCA revealed variation across the types of lexical bundles preferred by individual translators. HCA further identified the presence of a subgroup of translated texts that cluster with non-translated texts, rather than with their fellow translated texts. This was taken as indicating that the use of lexical bundles varied among the translators and that the division between translated and non-translated texts is not clear-cut.

Available under the CC BY-NC 4.0 license.
Loading

Article metrics loading...

/content/journals/10.54754/incontext.v2i1.11
2022-04-28
2026-04-21
Loading full text...

Full text loading...

References

  1. Baayen, R. Harald
    (2008) Analyzing Linguistic Data: A Practical Introduction to Statistics Using R. Cambridge University Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  2. Baker, Mona
    (2004) A corpus-based view of similarity and difference in translation. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 9(2), 167–193. 10.1075/ijcl.9.2.02bak
    https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.9.2.02bak [Google Scholar]
  3. (1996) Corpus-based translation studies: The challenges that lie ahead. InHarold Somers (Ed.), Terminology, LSP, and Translation: Studies in Language Engineering in Honour of Juan C. Sager (pp.175–186). John Benjamins.
    [Google Scholar]
  4. Biber, Douglas and Federica Barbieri
    (2007) Lexical bundles in university spoken and written registers. English for Specific Purposes, 26(3), 263–286. 10.1016/j.esp.2006.08.003
    https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esp.2006.08.003 [Google Scholar]
  5. Biber, Douglas and Susan Conrad
    (1999) Lexical bundles in conversation and academic prose. InHilde Hasselgård & Signe Oksefjell (Eds.), Out of Corpora: Studies in Honour of Stig Johansson (pp.181–189). Rodopi.
    [Google Scholar]
  6. Biber, Douglas, Susan Conrad and Viviana Cortes
    (2004) If you look at …: Lexical bundles in university teaching and textbooks. Applied Linguistics, 25(3), 371–405. 10.1093/applin/25.3.371
    https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/25.3.371 [Google Scholar]
  7. Biber, Douglas, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad and Edward Finegan
    (1999) Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Pearson Educated Ltd.
    [Google Scholar]
  8. Burrows, John
    (2002) ‘Delta’: A measure of stylistic difference and a guide to likely authorship. Literary and Linguistic Computing, 17(3), 267–287.
    [Google Scholar]
  9. (1987) Word-patterns and story-shapes: The statistical analysis of narrative style. Literary and Linguistic Computing, 2(2), 61–70.
    [Google Scholar]
  10. De Sutter, Gert, Isabelle Delaere and Koen Plevoets
    (2012) Lexical lectometry in corpus-based translation studies: Combining profile-based correspondence analysis and logistic regression modeling. InMichael P. Oakes & Meng Ji (Eds.), Quantitative Methods in Corpus-based Translation Studies: A Practical Guide to Descriptive Translation Research (pp.325–346). John Benjamins. 10.1075/scl.51.13sut
    https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.51.13sut [Google Scholar]
  11. Everitt, Brian and Torsten Hothorn
    (2011) An Introduction to Applied Multivariate Analysis with R. Springer. 10.1007/978‑1‑4419‑9650‑3
    https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-9650-3 [Google Scholar]
  12. Forsyth, Richard S. and Phoenix W. Y. Lam
    (2014) Found in translation: To what extent is authorial discriminability preserved by translators?Literary and Linguistic Computing, 29(2), 199–217. 10.1093/llc/fqt018
    https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqt018 [Google Scholar]
  13. Grabowski, Łukasz
    (2013) Interfacing corpus linguistics and computational stylistics: Translation universals in translational literary Polish. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 18(2), 254–280. 10.1075/ijcl.18.2.04gra
    https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.18.2.04gra [Google Scholar]
  14. Husson, François, Sébastien Lé and Jérôme Pagès
    (2011) Exploratory Multivariate Analysis by Example Using R. CRC Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  15. Hyland, Ken
    (2008) As can be seen: Lexical bundles and disciplinary variation. English for Specific Purposes, 27(1), 4–21. 10.1016/j.esp.2007.06.001
    https://doi.org/10.1016/j.esp.2007.06.001 [Google Scholar]
  16. Jenset, Gard B.
    (2008) Basic R for corpus linguistics [Seminar handout]. University of Bergen. RetrievedFebruary 12, 2014fromfolk.uib.no/gje037/tutorialR.pdf
  17. Jenset, Gard B. and Barbara McGillivray
    (2012) Multivariate analyses of affix productivity in translated English. InMichael P. Oakes & Meng Ji (Eds.), Quantitative Methods in Corpus-based Translation Studies: A Practical Guide to Descriptive Translation Research (pp.301–324). John Benjamins.
    [Google Scholar]
  18. Kenny, Dorothy
    (2001) Lexis and Creativity in Translation: A Corpus-based Study. St. Jerome Publishing.
    [Google Scholar]
  19. (2000) Translators at play: Exploitations of collocational norms in German English. InDodd Bill (Ed.), Working with German Corpora: With a Foreword by John Sinclair (pp.143–160). University of Birmingham Press.
    [Google Scholar]
  20. (1999) The German-English parallel corpus of literary texts (GEPCOLT): A resource for translation scholars. Teanga, 1(18), 25–42.
    [Google Scholar]
  21. (1998) Creatures of habit? What translators usually do with words. Meta, 43(4), 515–523. 10.7202/003302ar
    https://doi.org/10.7202/003302ar [Google Scholar]
  22. Lee, Changsoo
    (2021) How do machine translators measure up to human literary translators in stylometric tests?Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 1–17. 10.1093/llc/fqab091
    https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqab091 [Google Scholar]
  23. (2013) Using lexical bundle analysis as discovery tool for corpus-based translation research. Perspectives, 21(3), 378–395. 10.1080/0907676x.2012.657655
    https://doi.org/10.1080/0907676x.2012.657655 [Google Scholar]
  24. Malmkjaer, Kirsten
    (1998) Love thy neighbour: Will parallel corpora endear linguists to translators?Meta, 43(4), 534–541. 10.7202/003545ar
    https://doi.org/10.7202/003545ar [Google Scholar]
  25. Raykov, Tenko and George A. Marcoulides
    (2008) An Introduction to Applied Multivariate Analysis. Routledge.
    [Google Scholar]
  26. Rybicki, Jan
    (2006) Burrowing into translation: Character idiolects in Henryk Sienkiewicz’s trilogy and its two English translations. Literary and Linguistic Computing, 21(1), 91–103. 10.1093/llc/fqh051
    https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqh051 [Google Scholar]
  27. Rybicki, Jan and Magda Heydel
    (2013) The stylistics and stylometry of collaborative translation: Woolf’s Night and Day in Polish. Literary and Linguistic Computing, 28(4), 708–717. 10.1093/llc/fqt027
    https://doi.org/10.1093/llc/fqt027 [Google Scholar]
  28. Scott, Mike and Christopher Tribble
    (2006) Textual Patterns: Key Words and Corpus Analysis in Language Education. John Benjamins. 10.1075/scl.22
    https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.22 [Google Scholar]
  29. Toury, Gideon
    (1995) Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond. John Benjamins.
    [Google Scholar]
  30. (1980) In Search of a Theory of Translation. Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics, Tel Aviv University.
    [Google Scholar]
  31. Venuti, Lawrence
    (1995) The Translator’s Invisibility. Routledge. 10.4324/9780203360064
    https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203360064 [Google Scholar]
  32. Xiao, Richard
    (2010) Idioms, word clusters, and reformulation markers in translational Chinese: Can “translation universals” survive in Mandarin?InXiao Richard (Ed.), Proceedings of the International Symposium on Using Corpora in Contrastive and Translation Studies (pp.1–40). www.lancs.ac.uk/fass/projects/corpus/UCCTS2010Proceedings
    [Google Scholar]
/content/journals/10.54754/incontext.v2i1.11
Loading
This is a required field
Please enter a valid email address
Approval was successful
Invalid data
An Error Occurred
Approval was partially successful, following selected items could not be processed due to error