Cover not available
Article published In:
International Journal of Corpus Linguistics
Vol. 22:2 (2017) ► pp.270–297

Methodological issues in the use of directional parallel corpora

A case study of English and French concessive connectives

| Université Catholique de Louvain
| Université de Berne

The recent emergence of large parallel corpora has represented a leap ahead for cross-linguistic and translation studies. However, the specificities of these corpora and their influence on the nature of observed linguistic phenomena remain underexplored, especially in the field of contrastive linguistics. In this study, we compare the translation equivalences of four concessive adverbial connectives in English and in French across three corpora varying along three dimensions: register, directionality of the translation and translator expertise. Our results indicate that these dimensions affect the cross-linguistic equivalences observed between connectives. We conclude that, in future work, translation-based claims about cross-linguistic equivalences should be balanced according to the type of data analysed. We also identify a pressing need for more rigorously-documented parallel corpora for the English-French language pair.

Keywords: translation corpora, concessive connectives, register variation, English, French
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Register effects in contrastive corpus studies
  • 3.Cross-linguistic studies of connectives
  • 4.Equivalences between English and French connectives in three directional parallel corpora
    • 4.1Data
    • 4.2Extraction and disambiguation of concessive connectives
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1Frequencies of concessive connectives across the three corpora
    • 5.2Translations of the concessive connectives across the three corpora
  • 6.Discussion
    • 6.1Register differences in cross-linguistic equivalences
    • 6.2Differences between the translation directions
    • 6.3Differences related to the translator’s expertise
    • 6.4Other potentially relevant factors
  • 7.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 16 October 2017
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.22.2.05dup
References
Albl-Mikasa, M.
(2013) ELF speakers’ restricted power of expression: Implications for interpreters’ processing. Translation and Interpreting Studies, 8(2), 191–210. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Altenberg, B.
(1999) Adverbial connectors in English and Swedish: Semantic and lexical correspondences. In H. Hasselgård & S. Oksefjell (Eds.), Out of Corpora. Studies in Honour of Stig Johansson (pp. 249–268). Amsterdam: Rodopi.Google Scholar
(2007) The correspondence of resultive connectors in English and Swedish. Nordic Journal of English Studies, 6(1), 1–26. Retrieved from [URL] (last accessed November 2015).
Anscombre, J. -C., & Ducrot, O.
(1977) Deux mais en français? Lingua, 43(1), 23–40. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Asr, F., & Demberg, V.
(2012) Implicitness of discourse relations. In M. Kay & C. Boitet (Eds.), Proceedings of COLING: Technical Papers (pp. 2669–2684). Mumbai: Indian Institute of Technology Bombay.Google Scholar
Baker, M.
(1993) Corpus linguistics and translation studies: Implications and applications. In M. Baker, G. Francis & E. Tognini-Bonelli (Eds.), Studies in Text and Technology. In Honour of John Sinclair (pp. 233–250). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Barlow, M.
(2008) Parallel texts and corpus-based contrastive analysis. In M. de los Ángeles Gómez González, J. Lachlan Mackenzie & E. González Álvarez (Eds.), Current Trends in Contrastive Linguistics. Functional and Cognitive Perspectives (pp. 101–121). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Becher, V.
(2011) When and why do translators add connectives? Target, 23(1), 26–47. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Beeby Lonsdale, A.
(2009) Directionality. In G. Saldanha & M. Baker (Eds.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies (pp. 84–88). London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Bernardini, S., & Baroni, M.
(2005) Spotting translationese: A corpus-driven approach using support vector machines. In P. Danielsson & M. Wagenmakers (Eds.), Proceedings of Corpus Linguistics 2005, Vol. 11 (pp. 1–12). Birmingham: University of Birmingham.Google Scholar
Blakemore, D.
(2002) Relevance and Linguistic Meaning. The Semantics and Pragmatics of Discourse Markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Blumenthal, P.
(1980) La Syntaxe du Message. Application au Français Moderne. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bowker, L.
(2005) Productivity vs. quality? A pilot study on the impact of translation memory systems. Localisation Focus, 4(1), 13–20.Google Scholar
Candel-Mora, M.
(2015) Comparable corpus approach to explore the influence of computer-assisted translation systems on textuality. Procedia – Social and Behavioural Sciences, 1981, 67–73. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cartoni, B., Zufferey, S., & Meyer, T.
(2013) Using the Europarl corpus for linguistic research. Belgian Journal of Linguistics, 271, 23–42. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cettolo, M., Girardi, C., & Federico, M.
(2012) WIT: Web Inventory of Transcribed and Translated Talks. Proceedings of the 16th EAMT Conference (pp. 261–268). Trento, Italy.Google Scholar
Das, D., & Taboada, M.
(2013) Explicit and implicit coherence relations: A corpus study. In S. Luo (Ed.), Proceedings of the 2013 annual conference of the Canadian Linguistic Association. Victoria: University of Victoria.Google Scholar
Degand, L.
(2004) Contrastive analyses, translation and speaker involvement: The case of ‘puisque’ and ‘aangezien’. In M. Achard & S. Kemmer (Eds.), Language, Culture and Mind (pp. 251–270). Stanford: CSLI Publications.Google Scholar
Delaere, I., & De Sutter, G.
(2016) Variability of English loanword use in Belgian Dutch translations. Measuring the effect of source language, register, and editorial intervention. In G. De Sutter, M. -A. Lefer & I. Delaere (Eds.), Empirical Translation Studies. New Methodological and Theoretical Traditions. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter.Google Scholar
Elimam, A.
(2007) The impact of translation memory tools on the translation profession. Translation Journal, 11(1).Retrieved from [URL] (last accessed August 2017).
Englund Dimitrova, B.
(2005) Expertise and Explicitation in the Translation Process. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Granger, S.
(2014) A lexical bundle approach to comparing languages. Stems in English and French. Languages in Contrast, 14(1), 58–72. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Gregory, M., & Carroll, S.
(1978) Language and Situation: Language Varieties and their Social Contexts. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Halliday, M. A. K., & Hasan, R.
(1976) Cohesion in English. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Halverson, S.
(2004) Connectives as a translation problem. In H. Kittel, A. Frank, N. Greiner, T. Hermans, W. Koller, J. Lamber & F. Paul (Eds.), Translation: An International Encyclopedia of Translation Studies (pp. 562–572). Berlin/New York: Walter de Gruyter.Google Scholar
Hansen-Schirra, S., Neumann, S., & Steiner, E.
(2012) Cross-Linguistic Corpora for the Study of Translations. Insights from the Language Pair English-German. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hervey, S., & Higgins, I.
(1992) Thinking Translation. London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Hoek, J., & Zufferey, S.
(2015) Factors influencing the implicitation of discourse relations across languages. In H. Bunt (Ed.), Proceedings of the 11th Joint ISO-ACL/SIGSEM Workshop on Interoperable Semantic Annotation (pp. 39–45). Tilburg: Tilburg Centre for Cognition and Communication.Google Scholar
Holland, R.
(2012) News translation. In C. Millán & F. Bartrina (Eds.) The Routledge Handbook of Translation Studies (pp. 332–346). London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Johansson, S.
(2007) Seeing Through Multilingual Corpora. On the Use of Corpora in Contrastive Studies. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Knott, A., & Dale, R.
(1994) Using linguistic phenomena to motivate a set of coherence relations. Discourse Processes, 18(1), 35–62. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Koehn, P.
(2005) Europarl: A parallel corpus for statistical machine translation. (pp. 79–86). Phuket, Thailand.Google Scholar
Kunz, K., & Lapshinova-Koltunski, E.
(2015) Cross-linguistic analysis of discourse variation across registers. Nordic Journal of English Studies, 14(1), 258–288. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lefer, M. -A., & Grabar, N.
(2015)  Super-creative and over-bureaucratic: A cross-genre corpus-based study on the use and translation of evaluative prefixation in TED talks and EU parliamentary debates. Across Languages and Cultures, 16(2), 187–208. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Lefer, M. -A., & Vogeleer, S.
(Eds.) (2014) Genre- and Register-related Discourse Features in Contrast [Special issue]. Languages in Contrast. 14(1).Google Scholar
Liu, D.
(2008) Linking adverbials. An across-register corpus study and its implications. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics, 13(4), 491–518. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Macken, I., De Clercq, O., & Paulussen, H.
(2011) Dutch Parallel Corpus: A balanced copyright-cleared parallel corpus. Meta, 56(2), 374–390. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mann, W., & Thompson, S.
(1992) Relational discourse structure: A comparison of approaches to structuring text by ‘Contrast’. In S. Hwang & W. Merrifield (Eds), Language in Context: Essays for Robert E. Longacre (pp. 19–45). Dallas, TX: SIL.Google Scholar
Murray, J.
(1995) Logical connectives and local coherence. In R. Lorch & E. O’Brien (Eds.), Sources of Cohesion in Text Comprehension (pp. 107–125). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.Google Scholar
(1997) Connectives and narrative text. The role of continuity. Memory and Cognition, 25(2), 227–236. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Neumann, S.
(2014) Cross-linguistic register studies. Theoretical and methodological considerations. Languages in Contrast, 14(1), 35–57. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
O’Hagan, M.
(2009) Computer-aided translation (CAT). In G. Saldanha & M. Baker (Eds.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies (pp. 48–51). London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Pit, M.
(2007) Cross-linguistic analyses of backward causal connectives in Dutch, German and French. Languages in Contrast, 7(1), 53–82. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pokorn, N.
(2010) Directionality. In Y. Gambier & L. Van Doorslaer (Eds.), Handbook of Translation Studies, vol. 21 (pp. 37–39). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins.Google Scholar
Prasad, R., Dinesh, N., Lee, A., Miltsakaki, E., Robaldo, L., Joshi, A., & Webber, B.
(2008) The Penn Discourse TreeBank 2.0. In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (pp. 2961–2968). Marrakech: European Language Resources Association.Google Scholar
Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G., & Svartvik, J.
(1985) A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Nisioi, S., Rabinovich, E., Dinu, L. & Wintner, S.
(2016) A corpus of native, non-native and translated texts. In N. Calzolari et al. (Eds.), Proceedings of the 10th Language and Resources Evaluation Conference (LREC) (pp. 4197–4201). Porotrož, Slovenia.Google Scholar
Sanders, T.
(1997) Semantic and pragmatic sources of coherence: On the categorization of coherence relations in context. Discourse Processes, 24(1), 119–148. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Schäler, R.
(2009) Localization. In G. Saldanha & M. Baker (Eds.), Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies (pp. 157–161). London: Routledge.Google Scholar
Shreve, G.
(1997) Cognition and the evolution of translation competence. In J. Danks, G. Shreve, S. Fountain & M. McBeath (Eds.), Cognitive Processes in Translation and Interpreting (pp. 120–136). Thousand Oaks: Sage.Google Scholar
Smith, R. & Frawley, W.
(1983) Conjunctive cohesion in four English genres. Text, 3(4), 347–374. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Tirkonnen-Condit, S.
(2005) The Monitor Model revisited: Evidence from process research. Meta, 50(2), 405–414. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Vinay, J. -P., & Darbelnet, J.
(1995) Comparative Stylistics of French and English. A Methodology for Translation. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Zufferey, S., & Cartoni, B.
(2012) English and French causal connectives in contrast. Languages in Contrast, 12(2), 232–250. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
(2014) A multifactorial analysis of explicitation in translation. Target, 26(3), 361–384. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Zufferey, S., & Gygax, P.
(2016) Discourse relations with a perspective shift are difficult to convey implicitly. Evidence from processing and translating the French connective en effet . Discourse Processes, 53(7), 532–555. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 12 other publications

Crible, Ludivine, Ágnes Abuczki, Nijolė Burkšaitienė, Péter Furkó, Anna Nedoluzhko, Sigita Rackevičienė, Giedrė Valūnaitė Oleškevičienė & Šárka Zikánová
2019. Functions and translations of discourse markers in TED Talks: A parallel corpus study of underspecification in five languages. Journal of Pragmatics 142 ► pp. 139 ff. DOI logo
Farahani, Mehrdad Vasheghani & Reza Kazemian
2021. Speaker-Audience Interaction in Spoken Political Discourse : A Contrastive Parallel Corpus-Based Study of English-Persian Translation of Metadiscourse Features in TED Talks. Corpus Pragmatics 5:2 ► pp. 271 ff. DOI logo
Ghane, Zahra & Mehrdad Vasheghani Farahani
2022. Function and translation of the thetical you know: a parallel corpus-based investigation of English and Persian. Corpora 17:3 ► pp. 363 ff. DOI logo
Grabowski, Łukasz & Nicholas Groom
2022. Functionally-defined recurrent multi-word units in English-to-Polish translation. Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada/Spanish Journal of Applied Linguistics 35:1 ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Guryev, Alexander
2021. Marqueurs reformulatifs en français et en russe: de quelques intéressants parallélismes entre les deux langues. Journal of French Language Studies 31:3 ► pp. 338 ff. DOI logo
Hoek, Jet, Sandrine Zufferey, Jacqueline Evers-Vermeul & Ted J.M. Sanders
2017. Cognitive complexity and the linguistic marking of coherence relations: A parallel corpus study. Journal of Pragmatics 121 ► pp. 113 ff. DOI logo
Lefer, Marie-Aude
2020. Parallel Corpora. In A Practical Handbook of Corpus Linguistics, ► pp. 257 ff. DOI logo
Oksefjell Ebeling, Signe & Jarle Ebeling
2020. Dialogue vs. narrative in fiction. Languages in Contrast 20:2 ► pp. 288 ff. DOI logo
Shin, Jiyoung, Harris Hyun-soo Kim, Eun Mee Kim, Yookyung Choi & Eunhee Ha
2020. Impact of an Educational Program on Behavioral Changes toward Environmental Health among Laotian Students. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 17:14 ► pp. 5055 ff. DOI logo
Tatsenko, Nataliia, Vitalii Stepanov & Hanna Shcherbak
2020. CONCEPTUAL MODEL OF POLITICS IN AMERICAN ENGLISH. Humanities & Social Sciences Reviews 8:2 ► pp. 248 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2020. References. In Introduction to Corpus Linguistics, ► pp. 233 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2021. Conjunctive Markers of Contrast in English and French [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 99], DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 31 march 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.