Cover not available
Part of
Constraints on Language Variation and Change in Complex Multilingual Contact Settings
Edited by Bertus van Rooy and Haidee Kotze
[Contact Language Library 60] 2024
► pp. 153–190

Chapter 6
The effect of directionality on lexico‑syntactic simplification in French><English student translation

 | Université catholique de Louvain
 | Université catholique de Louvain
 | Université catholique de Louvain
This chapter reports on an exploratory case study designed to investigate lexico-syntactic simplification in French><English translations produced by students in two within-subjects language contact settings: Translation from the foreign language (FL) into the first language (L1) (FL>L1 translation) and translation from the L1 into the FL (L1>FL translation). The aim of the study is to determine whether directionality affects student translation production and, if so, how. Lexico-syntactic simplification is operationalised as mean sentence length, root lemma-token ratio, lexical density, and core vocabulary coverage. The results indicate that translation directionality exerts an effect on the distribution of lexical items (lemmas, lexical words, and high-frequency words) in the translations (as compared to their corresponding source texts), with there being more lexical simplification in L1>FL translation than in FL>L1 translation. They reveal, in addition, that student translation production is also impacted by constraints both at the macro level (translation experience) and at the micro level (students’ idiosyncrasies and individual source texts).
Keywords: lexico-syntactic simplification, simplicity, complexity, translation directionality, bilingual language production, constrained language, student translation
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Theoretical background
    • 2.1Translation directionality in CBTS
    • 2.2The construct of simplification in bilingual language production
      • 2.2.1Simplification/simplicity and translation: The CBTS perspective
      • 2.2.2Simplification/complexity and L2/FL production: The SLA/LCR perspective
  • 3.Data and methodology
    • 3.1Data description
    • 3.2Linguistic analyses
    • 3.3Statistical analyses
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Lexico-syntactic simplicity in translations into L1 French and FL English
    • 4.2Lexico-syntactic simplification in target texts
  • 5.Discussion and conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
  • Appendix
Published online: 20 June 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/coll.60.06pen
References (63)
References
Aboh, Enoch O., & Smith, Norval. (Eds.). (2009). Complex processes in new languages. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Baker, Mona. (1993). Corpus linguistics and translation studies: Implications and applications. In Mona Baker, Gill Francis, & Elena Tognini-Bonelli (Eds.), Text and technology: In honour of John Sinclair (pp. 233–250). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. (1996). Corpus-based translation studies: The challenges that lie ahead. In Harold Somers (Ed.), Terminology, LSP and translation: Studies in language engineering in honour of Juan C. Sager (pp. 175–186). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bernardini, Silvia, Ferraresi, Adriano, & Miličević, Maja. (2016). From EPIC to EPTIC: Exploring simplification in interpreting and translation from an intermodal perspective. Target, 28(1), 61–86. DOI logo Google Scholar
Buchweitz, Augusto, & Alves, Fabio. (2006). Cognitive adaptation in translation: An interface between language direction, time, and recursiveness in target text production. Letras de hoje [Letters today], 41(2), 241–272. 〈[URL]〉
Bulté, Bram, & Housen, Alex. (2012). Defining and operationalising L2 complexity. In Alex Housen, Folkert Kuiken, & Ineke Vedder (Eds.), Dimensions of L2 performance and proficiency: Complexity, accuracy and fluency in SLA (pp. 21–46). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chang, Vincent C.-Y. (2011). Translation directionality and the revised hierarchical model: An eye-tracking study. In Sharon O’Brien (Ed.), Cognitive explorations of translation (pp. 154–174). London: Continuum.Google Scholar
Corpas Pastor, Gloria, Mitkov, Ruslan, Afzal, Naveed, & Pekar, Viktor. (2008). Translation universals: Do they exist? A corpus-based NLP study of convergence and simplification. In Proceedings of the Eighth Biennial Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas (AMTA) (pp. 75–81). 〈[URL]〉
Crossley, Scott A., Allen, David B., & McNamara, Danielle S. (2011). Text readability and intuitive simplification: A comparison of readability formulas. Reading in a Foreign Language, 23(1), 84–101.Google Scholar
Crossley, Scott A., & McNamara, Danielle S. (2012). Detecting the first language of second language writers using automated indices of cohesion, lexical sophistication, syntactic complexity and conceptual knowledge. In Scott Jarvis, & Scott A. Crossley (Eds.), Approaching language transfer through text classification: Explorations in the detection-based approach (pp. 106–126). Bristol: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar
Crossley, Scott A., Skalicky, Stephen, & Dascalu, Mihai. (2019). Moving beyond classic readability formulas: New methods and new models. Journal of Research in Reading, 42(3–4), 541–561. DOI logo Google Scholar
Duběda, Tomáš. (2018). La traduction vers une langue étrangère : Compétences, attitudes, contexte social [Translating into a foreign language: Competences, attitudes, social context]. Meta, 63(2), 492–509. DOI logo Google Scholar
Dupont, Maïté, & Zufferey, Sandrine. (2017). Methodological issues in the use of directional parallel corpora: A case study of English and French concessive connectives. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 22(2), 270–297. DOI logo Google Scholar
Ellis, Rod. (2008). The study of second language acquisition. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Evert, Stefan, & Neumann, Stella. (2017). The impact of translation direction on characteristics of translated texts: A multivariate analysis for English and German. In Gert de Sutter, Marie-Aude Lefer, & Isabelle Delaere (Eds.), Empirical translation studies: New theoretical and methodological traditions (pp. 47–80). Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton.Google Scholar
Ferraresi, Adriano, Bernardini, Silvia, Miličević Petrović, Maja, & Lefer, Marie-Aude. (2018). Simplified or not simplified? The different guises of mediated English at the European Parliament. Meta, 63(3), 716–737. DOI logo Google Scholar
Ferreira, Aline, & Schwieter, John W. (2017). Directionality in translation. In John W. Schwieter, & Aline Ferreira (Eds.), The handbook of translation and cognition (pp. 90–105). Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell.Google Scholar
Grabowski, Łukasz. (2013). Interfacing corpus linguistics and computational stylistics: Translation universals in translational literary Polish. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 18(2), 254–280. DOI logo Google Scholar
Granger, Sylviane, & Lefer, Marie-Aude. (2020). The Multilingual Student Translation Corpus: A resource for translation teaching and research. Language Resources and Evaluation, 54, 1183–1199. DOI logo Google Scholar
Hinkel, Eli. (2003). Simplicity without elegance: Features of sentences in L1 and L2 academic texts. Tesol Quarterly, 37(2), 275–301. DOI logo Google Scholar
Housen, Alex, Kuiken, Folkert, & Vedder, Ineke. (Eds.). (2012). Dimensions of L2 performance and proficiency: Complexity, accuracy and fluency in SLA. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hvelplund, Kristian T. (2011). Allocation of cognitive resources in translation: An eye-tracking and key-logging study. Unpublished PhD thesis. Copenhagen Business School. 〈[URL]〉
Jakubíček, Miloš, Kilgarriff, Adam, Kovář, Vojtěch, Rychlý, Pavel, & Suchomel, Vít. (2013). The TenTen Corpus family. Paper presented at the Seventh International Corpus Linguistics Conference (CL2013), Lancaster, England, 23–26 July.
Jarvis, Scott. (2013). Defining and measuring lexical diversity. In Scott Jarvis, & Michael Daller (Eds.), Vocabulary knowledge: Human ratings and automated measures (pp. 13–44). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logo Google Scholar
Jensen, Kristian Tangsgaard Hvelplund. (2009). Indicators of text complexity. In Susanne Göpferich, Arnt Lykke Jakobsen, & Inger M. Mees (Eds.), Behind the mind: Methods, models and results in translation process research (pp. 61–80). Copenhagen: Samfundslitteratur.Google Scholar
Kilgarriff, Adam, Baisa, Vít, Bušta, Jan, Jakubíček, Miloš, Kovář, Vojtěch, Michelfeit, Jan, Rychlý, Pavel, & Suchomel, Vít. (2014). The Sketch Engine: Ten years on. Lexicography, 1(1), 7–36. DOI logo Google Scholar
Kotze, Haidee. (2020). Converging what and how to find out why: An outlook on empirical translation studies. In Lore Vandevoorde, Joke Daems, & Bart Defrancq (Eds.), New empirical perspectives on translation and interpreting (pp. 333–370). London: Routledge.Google Scholar
. (2022). Translation as constrained communication: Principles, concepts and methods. In Sylviane Granger, & Marie-Aude Lefer (Eds.), Extending the scope of corpus-based translation studies (pp. 67–97). London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
Kruger, Haidee, & Van Rooy, Bertus. (2016). Constrained language: A multidimensional analysis of translated English and a non-native indigenised variety of English. English World-Wide, 37(1), 26–57. DOI logo Google Scholar
Lanstyák, István, & Heltai, Pál. (2012). Universals in language contact and translation. Across Languages and Cultures, 13(1), 99–121. DOI logo Google Scholar
Laviosa, Sara. (1998a). Core patterns of lexical use in a comparable corpus of English narrative prose. Meta, 43(4), 557–570. DOI logo Google Scholar
. (1998b). The English Comparable Corpus: A resource and a methodology. In Lynne Bowker, Michael Cronin, Dorothy Kenny, & Jennifer Pearson (Eds.), Unity in diversity? Current trends in translation studies (pp. 101–112). London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Lefer, Marie-Aude. (2020). Parallel corpora. In Magali Paquot, & Stefan Th. Gries (Eds.), Practical handbook of corpus linguistics (pp. 257–282). Cham: Springer. DOI logo Google Scholar
Lemhöfer, Kristin, & Broersma, Mirjam. (2012). Introducing LexTALE: A quick and valid Lexical Test for Advanced Learners of English. Behavior Research Methods, 44, 325–343. DOI logo Google Scholar
Leow, Ronald P. (1997). Simplification and second language acquisition. World Englishes, 16(2), 291–296. DOI logo Google Scholar
Marchand, Tim, & Akutsu, Sumie. (2015). First steps in assigning proficiency to texts in a learner corpus of computer-mediated communication. In Marcus Callies, & Sandra Götz (Eds.), Learner corpora in language testing and assessment (pp. 85–112). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Meisel, Jürgen M. (1980). Linguistic simplification. In Sascha W. Felix (Ed.), Second language development: Trends and issues (pp. 13–40). Tübingen: Gunter Nar.Google Scholar
Neumann, Stella. (2019). Corpus insight on the complexity of directionality in translation. Paper presented at the Bilingualism and Directionality in Translation Conference, Brussels, Belgium, 12 December.
Padró, Lluís, & Stanilovsky, Evgeny. (2012). FreeLing 3.0: Towards wider multilinguality. In Nicoletta Calzolari, Khalid Choukri, Thierry Declerck, Mehmet U. Doğan, Bente Maegaard, Joseph Mariani, Asuncion Moreno, Jan Odijk, & Stelios Piperidis (Eds.), Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2012) (pp. 2473–2479). European Language Resources Association (ELRA).Google Scholar
Paquot, Magali. (2019). The phraseological dimension in interlanguage complexity research. Second Language Research, 35(1), 121–145. DOI logo Google Scholar
Pavlović, Nataša, & Jensen, Kristian T. H. (2009). Eye tracking translation directionality. In Anthony Pym, & Alexander Perekrestenko (Eds.), Translation Research Projects 2 (pp. 93–109). Tarragona: Intercultural Studies Group.Google Scholar
Pokorn, Nike K., Blake, Jason, Reindl, Donald, & Peterlin, Agnes P. (2019). The influence of directionality on the quality of translation output in educational settings. The Interpreter and Translator Trainer, 14(1), 58–78. DOI logo Google Scholar
Pym, Anthony. (2008). On Toury’s laws of how translators translate. In Anthony Pym, Miriam Shlesinger, & Daniel Simeoni (Eds.), Beyond descriptive translation studies: Investigations in homage to Gideon Toury (pp. 311–328). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
R Core Team. (2020). R: A language and environment for statistical computing. Vienna: R Foundation for Statistical Computing. 〈[URL]〉
Redelinghuys, Karien, & Kruger, Haidee. (2015). Using the features of translated language to investigate translation expertise: A corpus-based study. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 20(3), 293–325. DOI logo Google Scholar
Rodríguez-Inés, Patricia. (2013). ¿Cómo traducen traductores y profesores de idiomas? Estudio de corpus [How do translators and language teachers translate? A corpus study]. Meta, 58(1), 165–190. DOI logo Google Scholar
Rosen, Anna. (2016). The fate of linguistic innovations: Jersey English and French learner English compared. International Journal of Learner Corpus Research, 2(2), 302–322. DOI logo Google Scholar
Rubin, Rachel, Housen, Alex, & Paquot, Magali. (2021). Phraseological complexity as an index of L2 Dutch writing proficiency: A partial replication study. In Sylviane Granger (Ed.), Perspectives on the L2 phrasicon: The view from learner corpora (pp. 101–125). Bristol: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar
Saggion, Horacio, Gómez-Martínez, Elena, Etayo, Esteban, Anula, Aalberto, & Bourg, Lorena. (2011). Text simplification in simplext: Making texts more accessible. Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural [Natural language processing], 47, 341–342. 〈[URL]〉
Schmid, Helmut. (1994). Probabilistic part-of-speech tagging using decision trees. Paper presented at the Fifteenth International Conference on Computational Linguistics (COLING 1994), Kyoto, Japan, 5–9 August.
Skehan, Peter. (1998). A cognitive approach to language learning. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
. (2009). Modelling second language performance: Integrating complexity, accuracy, fluency, and lexis. Applied Linguistics, 30, 510–532. DOI logo Google Scholar
Sun, Sanjun. (2015). Measuring translation difficulty: Theoretical and methodological considerations. Across Languages and Cultures, 16(1), 29–54. DOI logo Google Scholar
. (2019). Measuring difficulty in translation and post-editing: A review. In Defeng Li, Victoria L. C. Lei, & Yuanjian He (Eds.), Researching cognitive processes of translation (pp. 139–168). Singapore: Springer.Google Scholar
Takashima, Hideyuki. (1992). Transfer, overgeneralization and simplification in second language acquisition: A case study in Japan. International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching (IRAL), 30(2), 97–120.Google Scholar
Van Hout, Roeland, & Vermeer, Anne. (2007). Comparing measures of lexical richness. In Helmut Daller, James Milton, & Jeanine Treffers-Daller (Eds.), Modelling and assessing vocabulary knowledge (pp. 93–115). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Veiga, Nancy V. (2016). Discourse markers in CEDEL2 and SPLLOC corpora of learner Spanish: Analysis of some lexical-pragmatic failures. In Margarita Alonso-Ramos (Ed.), Spanish learner corpus research: Current trends and future perspectives (pp. 267–297). Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logo Google Scholar
Vyatkina, Nina. (2013). Specific syntactic complexity: Developmental profiling of individuals based on an annotated learner corpus. The Modern Language Journal, 97(S1), 11–30. DOI logo Google Scholar
Wen, Ting-hui. (2014). Simplification in translated Chinese texts: A corpus-based study on mean sentence length. NCUE Journal of Humanities, 9, 253–271.Google Scholar
Whyatt, Bogusława. (2018). Old habits die hard: Towards understanding L2 translation. Między oryginałem a przekładem [Between originals and translations], 24(41), 89–112. DOI logo Google Scholar
. (2019). In search of directionality effects in the translation process and in the end product. Translation, Cognition & Behavior, 2(1), 79–100. DOI logo Google Scholar
Williams, Donna A. (2005). Recurrent features of translation in Canada: A corpus-based study. Unpublished PhD thesis. University of Ottawa.
Xiao, Richard, & Dai, Guangrong. (2014). Lexical and grammatical properties of Translational Chinese: Translation universal hypotheses reevaluated from the Chinese perspective. Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory, 10(1), 11–55. DOI logo Google Scholar
Cited by (1)

Cited by one other publication

Gilquin, Gaëtanelle & Lea Meriläinen
2024. Constrained communication in EFL and ESL. English World-Wide. A Journal of Varieties of English 45:2 ► pp. 196 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 14 november 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.