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Part of
The Corpus Linguistics Discourse: In honour of Wolfgang Teubert
Edited by Anna Čermáková and Michaela Mahlberg
[Studies in Corpus Linguistics 87] 2018
► pp. 185–204

Tracking the third code

A cross-linguistic corpus-driven approach to metadiscursive markers

| Université catholique de Louvain

Corpus-driven methods are a powerful heuristic for identifying features of translated language, particularly phraseological features, which have been largely neglected in crosslinguistic studies. This chapter presents the results of an n-gram based study of metadiscursive markers in original and translated English. Automatic comparison of three- to four-word recurrent sequences in the two corpora reveals a series of markers that are significantly overused or underused in translated language. One category of overused bundles, i.e. markers of contrast, is analysed in the light of translation universals and source language effects. In a wider perspective, the study highlights the benefits of a multi-corpus empirical basis for corpus-based crosslinguistic studies and draws the preliminary contours of a methodological framework, ‘Contrastive Translation Analysis’, which integrates comparable, translation and learner corpus data.

Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The issue of interpretation
  • 3.Phraseology: A prime locus for the third code
  • 4.Metadiscursive markers in original and translated English
    • 4.1Data and methodology
    • 4.2Over- and underused metadiscursive markers
    • 4.3Translation universal or systemic cross-linguistic difference?
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgement
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 6 December 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/scl.87.08gra
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