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Corpora in Translation and Contrastive Research in the Digital Age: Recent advances and explorations
Edited by Julia Lavid-López, Carmen Maíz-Arévalo and Juan Rafael Zamorano-Mansilla
[Benjamins Translation Library 158] 2021
► pp. 209–232

Chapter 8
The discourse markers well and so and their equivalents in the Portuguese and Turkish subparts of the TED-MDB corpus

ORCID logo | CLUL – Centre of Linguistics, School of Arts and Humanities, University of Lisbon
ORCID logo | Graduate School of Informatics, Cognitive Science Department, Middle East Technical University

The present research describes how the PDTB style of discourse annotation has been applied to transcribed TED Talks in the TED-MDB corpus, which include multifunctional elements such as well and so. The occurrence of these two markers is analyzed in English in comparison to the way they are conveyed in Portuguese and Turkish translations of TED-MDB. Their presence in discourse relations, as well as in question-response pairs found in TED Talks, are investigated. The implicitation of well and so in translation is shown to be related to their function in the context. Results also point to differences in the target languages regarding implicitation, especially when the discourse marker doesn’t fulfil a connective function.

Keywords: translation, TED Talks genre, PDTB discourse annotation, discourse markers, question-response pairs, Portuguese, Turkish, English
Article outline
  • Introduction
  • Research aims and method of analysis
  • The TED-MDB corpus
  • Related work: The view from speech annotation
    • A scheme for spoken language (Crible 2017)
    • Treatment of question-response sequences in various frameworks and TED-MDB
  • Data analysis
    • The case of well and its translations to Portuguese and Turkish in TED-MDB
    • The case of so and its translations to Portuguese and Turkish in TED-MDB
      • Cases of so omitted and kept in the translation
      • Cases of so translated and annotated
      • Cases of ommitted so where the pragmatic function survives in the translation
    • Discourse markers in question-response pairs
  • Conclusion and future work
  • Acknowledgements
  • Note
  • References
Published online: 8 December 2021
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/btl.158.08men
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