Cover not available
Article published In:
Babel
Vol. 65:1 (2019) ► pp.114–130

Interlingual transfer of social media terminology

A case study based on a corpus of English, Spanish and Brazilian newspaper articles

 | Universidad de Valladolid
 | Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro
This article addresses the terminology used in the field of social media, a new field introduced by recent technological advances. As social media was first created in an English-speaking context, speakers of other languages have had to develop ways to express the concepts of this field in their own languages. It is thus relevant for translators and journalists to understand the linguistic means by which the transfer of such concepts occurs. In order to achieve this, a comparable corpus of newspaper articles on social media (Facebook and WhatsApp) written in English, Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese was compiled and the procedures used by Brazilian Portuguese and Spanish journalists to convey frequently-used English terms were examined. The main translation procedures observed in the study are equivalence, calque, loan and paraphrase. Although most procedures occur in the texts written in both Spanish and Brazilian Portuguese, their frequency of use indicates linguistic preferences in the languages.
Keywords: social media terminology, corpus of newspaper articles, translation procedures, interlinguistic equivalence
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction and justification
  • 2.Aim
  • 3.Corpus design and compilation
    • 3.1Corpus design
    • 3.2Corpus features
  • 4.Translation procedures
  • 5.Analysis
  • 6.Results
    • 6.1English into Brazilian Portuguese
    • 6.2English into Spanish
    • 6.3Overall results
  • 7.Conclusions and future work
  • Note
  • Reference
Published online: 4 April 2019
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/babel.00077.ort
References (36)
Reference
Albert, Connie S.; and Al Farooq Salam. 2013. “Critical Discourse Analysis: Toward Theories in Social Media”. In Proceedings of the Nineteenth Americas Conference on Information Systems, Vol. 21: 926–933. Chichago (IL) [URL]
Anthony, Laurence. 2014. AntConc (Versión 3.4.3) [Computer Software]. Tokio: Waseda University. [URL]
Asociación para la Investigación de Medios de Comunicación. 2014. Encuesta general de medios. Madrid: AIMC.Google Scholar
Baker, Mona. 1992. In Other Words: A Coursebook on Translation. London: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bernardini, Silvia; and Adriano Ferraresi. 2013. “Old Needs, New Solutions: Comparable Corpora for Language Professionals”. In Building and Using Comparable Corpora, ed. by Serge Sharoff et al., 303–319. Berlin: Springer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bowker, Lynne; and Jennifer Pearson. 2002. Working with Specialized Language. A Practical Guide to Using Corpora. London: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Corpas Pastor, Gloria. 2001. “Compilación de un corpus ad hoc para la enseñanza de la traducción inversa especializada”. TRANS. Revista de Traductología 51: 155–184.Google Scholar
. 2004. “Localización de recursos y compilación de corpus vía Internet: Aplicaciones para la didáctica de la traducción médica especializada”. In Manual de documentación y terminología para la traducción especializada, ed. by Consuelo Gonzalo García; and Valentín García Yebra, 223–257. Madrid: Arco/Libros.Google Scholar
. 2008. Investigar con corpus en traducción: los retos de un nuevo paradigma. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Corpas Pastor, Gloria; and Míriam Seghiri. 2009. “Virtual Corpora as Documentation Resources: Translating Travel Documents (English-Spanish)”. In Corpus Use and Translating, ed. by Allison Beeby; Patricia Rodríguez Inés; and Pilar Sánchez Gijón, 75–107. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
García Rodríguez, Araceli; and Eva Rubio González. 2013. “Un paseo por la blogisfera de la literatura infantil y juvenil española: de los ‘blogslijeros’ a Facebook”. In Un paseo por la blogisfera de la literatura infantil y juvenil española: de los ‘blogslijeros’ a Facebook. Puntos de encuentro: Los primeros 20 años de la Facultad de Traducción y Documentación de la Universidad de Salamanca, ed. by Araceli García Rodríguez; and Eva Rubio González, 51–72. Salamanca: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca.Google Scholar
Instituto Verificador de Comunicaçao, 2016. Jornais e revistas. São Paulo: IVC.Google Scholar
Josselin, Amélie. 2005. Place et rôle des terminologies dans les dictionnaires généraux unilingues et bilingues: étude d’un domain de spécialité : volcanologie. Thèse doctorale. Lyon: Université Lyon II.Google Scholar
Maia, Belinda. 1997. “Do It Yourself Corpora... with a Little Help from Your Friends”. In PAC’97: Practical Applications in Language Corpora, ed. by Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk; and Patrick James Melia, 403–410. Lodz: Lodz University Press.Google Scholar
. 2000. “Making Corpora a Learning Process”. In I Corpora Nella Didattica della Traduzione - Corpus Use and Learning to Translate (CULT), ed. by Silvia Bernardini; and Federico Zanettin, 47–60. Bologna: Cooperativa Libraria Universitaria Editrice (Clueb).Google Scholar
Molina, Lucía; and Amparo Hurtado Albir. 2002. “Translation Techniques Revisited: A Dynamic and Functionalist Approach”. Meta 47 (4): 498–512. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Newmark, Peter. 1988. A Textbook of Translation. Hertfordshire: Prentice Hall.Google Scholar
NHS, 2014. National Reader Survey Oct13–Sep14. [URL]
O’Hagan, Minako. 2012. “The impact of new technologies on translation studies. A technological turn?” In The Routledge Handbook of Translation Studies, ed. by Carmen Millán; and Francesca Bartrina, 503–518. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Pearson, Jennifer. 1998. Terms in Context, Studies in Corpus Linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Rabadán, Rosa; and Purificación Fernández Nistal. 2002. La traducción inglés-español: fundamentos, herramientas, aplicaciones. León / Valladolid: Universidad de León/ITBYTE.Google Scholar
Roberts, Roda P. 2004. “Terms in General Dictionaries”. In A New Spectrum of Translation Studies, ed. by José María Bravo Gozalo, 121–140. Valladolid: Universidad de Valladolid.Google Scholar
Roberts, Roda P.; and Amélie Josselin. 2005. “Le Traitement des Termes dans les Dictionnaires Généraux”. In De la Mesure dans les Termes. Hommage à Philippe Thoiron, ed. by Henri Bejoint; and François Maniez, 324–348. Lyon: Presses Universitaires de Lyon.Google Scholar
Sánchez-Gijón, Pilar. 2003a. “És la web pública la nova biblioteca del traductor?” Tradumàtica: Traducció i tecnologies de la informació i la comunicació. [URL]
. 2003b. Els documents digitals especialitzats: utilització de la lingüística de corpus com a front de recursos per a la traducció. Tesis doctoral. Barcelona: Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona.Google Scholar
Schwartz, H. Andrew et al. 2013. “Personality, Gender, and Age in the Language of Social Media: The Open-Vocabulary Approach”. Plos One 8 (9): 1–16. [URL]
Seghiri, Míriam. 2006. Compilación de un corpus trilingüe de seguros turísticos (español- inglés-italiano): aspectos de evaluación, catalogación, diseño y representatividad. Málaga: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Málaga. [URL]
. 2008. “Creating Virtual Corpora Step by Step”. In Researching and Teaching Specialized Languages: New Contexts, New Challenges, ed. by P. Sánchez Hernández, 435–449. Murcia: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Murcia.Google Scholar
. 2017. “Metodología de elaboración de un glosario bilingüe y bidireccional (inglés-español/español-inglés) basado en corpus para la traducción de manuales de instrucciones de televisores“. Babel, 63 (1): 43–64. [URL]
Thurlow, Crispin; and Kristine Mroczek. 2011. Digital Discourse. Language in the New Media. Oxford: OUP. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Varantola, Krista. 2002. “Disposable Corpora as Intelligent Tools in Translation”. Cadernos de Traduçao 1 (9): 171–180. DOI logo
. 2003. “Translators and Disposable Corpora”. In Corpora in Translator Education, ed. by Federico Zanettin; Silvia Bernardini; and Dominic Stewart, 55–70. Manchester: St. Jerome.Google Scholar
Vinay, Jean-Paul; and Jean Darbelnet. 1958. Stylistique comparée du français et de l’anglais. Paris: Didier-Harrap.Google Scholar
Zanettin, Federico. 2002. “DIY Corpora: The WWW and the Translator”. In Training the Language Services Provider for the New Millennium, ed. by Belinda Maia; Johann Haller; and Margherita Urlrych. Oporto: Facultade de Letras, Universidade do Porto.Google Scholar
. 2012. Translation-Driven Corpora. Corpus Resources for Descriptive and Applied Translation Studies. Manchester: St. Jerome.Google Scholar
Zappavigna, Michele. 2012. Discourse of Twitter and Social Media. London: Continuum Books.Google Scholar
Cited by (2)

Cited by two other publications

Rull García, Irene & Kathryn P. Bove
2022. Ghosting, Breadcrumbing, Catfishing: A Corpus Analysis of English Borrowings in the Spanish Speaking World. Languages 7:2 ► pp. 119 ff. DOI logo
Chernovaty, Leonid, T. Andrienko, S. Potapenko & L. Slavova
2021. Rendering English pharmacological terms into Ukrainian: Translation and didactic dimensions. SHS Web of Conferences 105 ► pp. 03001 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 31 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.