Article published In:
TargetVol. 14:2 (2002) ► pp.207–220
Translationese – a myth or an empirical fact?
A study into the linguistic identifiability of translated language
This paper reports on a study in which subjects were asked to distinguish translations from originally produced (non-translated) texts. The aim was to identify the linguistic features shared by texts assumed to be translations, as well as those shared by texts assumed to be originally produced. The results show (i) that translations were not readily identifiable, and (ii) that the feature that seemed to guide the subjects’ decisions was the frequency vs. scarcity of target language specific (unique) items in the texts: their frequency led subjects to assume—correctly or incorrectly—that a text was original rather than translated. It is concluded that the unique items in non-translations vs. translations deserve further research in respect of their frequency and the impressions they make on readers.
Keywords: translationese, identifiability as translation, unique items, translated language, linguistic features of translations, universals of translation, translation quality
Article outline
- 1.Do translations differ from originally produced texts?
- 2.Can translations be identified?
- 3.What are the linguistic features that accompany the impression of original writing?
- 4.What are the linguistic features that suggest that a text might be a translation?
- 5.Do features hypothesized as translation universals attract identification as translation?
- 6.Does the impression of original writing go together with unique items?
- 7.Concluding remarks
-
References
References
Baker, Mona
1993 “Corpus linguistics and translation studies: Implications and applications”. Mona Baker, Gill Francis and Elena Tognini-Bonelli, eds. Text and technology: In honour of John Sinclair. Amsterdam—Philadelphia: John Benjamins 1993 233–250. 
1995 “Corpora in translation studies: An overview and some suggestions for future research”. Target 71. 223–243.
1996 “Corpus-based translation studies: The challenges that lie ahead”. Harold Somers, ed. Terminology, LSP and translation: Studies in language engineering in honour of Juan C. Sager. Amsterdam—Philadelphia: John Benjamins 1996 175–186.
Chesterman, Andrew
2001 “Classifying translation universals”. Paper read at the Third International EST Congress “Claims, Changes and Challenges in Translation Studies”, Copenhagen, 30th August to 1st September, 2001.
Flint, Aili
1980 Semantic structure in the Finnish lexicon: Verbs of possibility and sufficiency. Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura.
Fowler, H.W.
1965 [first edition: 1926] A dictionary of modern English usage. Second edition, revised by Sir Ernest Gowers. London: Oxford University Press.
Güttinger, Fritz
1963 Zielsprache: Theorie und Technik des Übersetzens. Zürich: Manesse Verlag.
Hakulinen, Auli
1987 “Avoiding personal reference in Finnish”. Jef Verschueren and Marcella Bertucelli-Papi, eds. The pragmatic perspective. Amsterdam—Philadelphia: John Benjamins 1987 00–00.
Hervey, Sandor
1998 “Speech acts and illocutionary function in translation methodology”. Leo Hickey, ed. The pragmatics of translation. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters 1998 10–24.
Kalasniemi, Mirja
1992 Ocenocnyj suffiks -#k-v russkom jazyke [The evaluative suffix -#k-in Russian]. Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä. [Studia philologica Jyväskyläensia 27.]
Laviosa-Braithwaite, Sara
1996 “Comparable corpora: Towards a corpuslinguistic methodology for the empirical study of translation”. Marcel Thelen and Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, eds. Translation and meaning Part 31. Maastricht: Rijkshogeschool 1996 153–163.
1997 The English comparable corpus (ECC): A resource and a methodology for the empirical study of translation. Manchester: UMIST. [Doctoral dissertation.]
Mauranen, Anna
2000 “Strange strings in translated language: A study on corpora”. Maeve Olohan, ed. Intercultural faultlines: Research models in Translation Studies I: Textual and cognitive aspects. Manchester: St. Jerome 2000 119–141.
Reiss, Katharina
1971 Möglichkeiten und Grenzen der Übersetzungskritik. München: Max Hueber.
Tirkkonen-Condit, Sonja
forthcoming. “Unique items—Over-or under-represented in translated language”. Paper read at the Conference “Universals in Translation—Do they Exist?”. Savonlinna, 19–20th October, 2001.
Toury, Gideon
Weizman, Elda and Shoshana Blum-Kulka
1987 “Identifying and interpreting translated texts: On the role of pragmatic adjustment”. Gideon Toury, ed. Translation across cultures. New Delhi: Bahri 1987 61–73.
Cited by
Cited by 53 other publications
Alwazna, Rafat Y.
2023. The Relation Between Explicitation and Translation Expertise in the Rendition of Nominalisation and Participles in Legal Qurʾānic Verses Specific to Purification and Prayer into English: A Corpus-Based Study. International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique 36:4 ► pp. 1717 ff. 
Beauvais, Clémentine
2020. Translated into British: European Children’s Literature, (in)Difference and Écart in the Age of Brexit. In Translating and Transmediating Children’s Literature, ► pp. 29 ff.
Biel, Łucja
2014. The textual fit of translated EU law: a corpus-based study of deontic modality. The Translator 20:3 ► pp. 332 ff.
Cappelle, Bert
2012. English is less rich in manner-of-motion verbs when translated from French. Across Languages and Cultures 13:2 ► pp. 173 ff.
Cappelle, Bert & Rudy Loock
2013. Is there interference of usage constraints?. Target. International Journal of Translation Studies 25:2 ► pp. 252 ff.
Chen, Wallace
2020. Corpus-based Research on Translational Chinese. In Corpus-based Translation and Interpreting Studies in Chinese Contexts, ► pp. 3 ff.
Chlumská, Lucie
2018. Prominent POS-Grams and n-Grams in Translated Czech in the Mirror of the English Source Texts. In Taming the Corpus [Quantitative Methods in the Humanities and Social Sciences, ], ► pp. 99 ff.
Chou, Isabelle, Weiyi Li, Kanglong Liu & Dipima Buragohain
2023. Representation of interactional metadiscourse in translated and native English: A corpus-assisted study. PLOS ONE 18:7 ► pp. e0284849 ff.
Chuang, Andrew H. C. & Haoran Yang
2022. From Translationese to Emergent Irony: A Usage-Based Approach to Chinese Bèi Passive. In Concepts, Discourses, and Translations [Second Language Learning and Teaching, ], ► pp. 357 ff.
Colson, Jean-Pierre
2020. Computational phraseology and translation studies. In Computational Phraseology [IVITRA Research in Linguistics and Literature, 24], ► pp. 66 ff.
Dose, Stefanie
2014. Vagueness as a recurring pattern in interpreted German speech. Southern African Linguistics and Applied Language Studies 32:3 ► pp. 331 ff.
Formentelli, Maicol & Maria Pavesi
2022. The pragmatic functions of tu and lei in films: Converging patterns of address across translated and original Italian dialogue. Journal of Pragmatics 201 ► pp. 15 ff.
Frankenberg-Garcia, Ana
2008. ‘Suggesting rather special facts’: a corpus-based study of distinctive lexical distributions in translated texts. Corpora 3:2 ► pp. 195 ff.
Frankenberg-Garcia, Ana
2011. O léxico diferenciado da tradução. Trabalhos em Linguística Aplicada 50:2 ► pp. 321 ff.
Gumul, Ewa
2022. Changing the text through explicitation. How trainee interpreters perceive the role of explicitating shifts. The Translator 28:2 ► pp. 234 ff.
Hareide, Lidun
2019. Comparable parallel corpora. In Parallel Corpora for Contrastive and Translation Studies [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 90], ► pp. 19 ff.
Hu, Kaibao
2016. Introduction. In Introducing Corpus-based Translation Studies [New Frontiers in Translation Studies, ], ► pp. 1 ff.
Hu, Kaibao
2016. Corpus-Based Study of Features of Translation. In Introducing Corpus-based Translation Studies [New Frontiers in Translation Studies, ], ► pp. 85 ff.
Huang, Libo
2015. Introduction. In Style in Translation: A Corpus-Based Perspective [New Frontiers in Translation Studies, ], ► pp. 1 ff.
Ji, Meng
2019. Advances in Empirical Translation Studies. In Advances in Empirical Translation Studies, ► pp. 1 ff.
Jiang, Yue & Jiang Niu
2022. A corpus-based search for machine translationese in terms of discourse coherence. Across Languages and Cultures 23:2 ► pp. 148 ff.
Kenny, Dorothy & Mali Satthachai
2019. Explicitation, Unique Items and the Translation of English Passives in Thai Legal Texts. Meta 63:3 ► pp. 604 ff.
Kruger, Haidee & Bertus Rooy
2012. Register and the features of translated language. Across Languages and Cultures 13:1 ► pp. 33 ff.
Kruger, Haidee & Bertus van Rooy
2018. Register variation in written contact varieties of English. English World-Wide. A Journal of Varieties of English 39:2 ► pp. 214 ff.
Loock, Rudy
2016. Références. In La traductologie de corpus, ► pp. 237 ff.
Luo, Jinru & Dechao Li
2022. Universals in machine translation?. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 27:1 ► pp. 31 ff.
Meldrum, Yukari Fukuchi
2010. Translationese in Japanese Literary Translation. TTR 22:1 ► pp. 93 ff.
Monzó-Nebot, Esther
2020. Translating genres, creating transgenres: Textual 'betweens' as situation-based systemic innovations. Estudios de Traducción 10 ► pp. 51 ff.
Mossberg, Mari & Kristina Jansson Ghadiri
2010. Les verbes introducteurs dans les incises de citation : étude contrastive français-suédois. Studia Neophilologica 82:1 ► pp. 69 ff.
Paprocka, Natalia & Agnieszka Wandel
2022. L’« amour en solo » dans les livres d’éducation sexuelle pour la jeunesse : comment le nomme-t-on dans les textes polonais traduits et non-traduits ?. Między Oryginałem a Przekładem 28:2(56) ► pp. 97 ff.
Ramón, Noelia & Camino Gutiérrez-Lanza
2018. Translation description for assessment and post-editing. Target. International Journal of Translation Studies 30:1 ► pp. 112 ff.
Ramón, Noelia & Belén Labrador
2008. Translations of ‘-ly’ adverbs of degree in an English-Spanish Parallel Corpus. Target. International Journal of Translation Studies 20:2 ► pp. 275 ff.
Robin, Edina, Andrea Götz, Éva Pataky & Henriette Szegh
2017. Translation Studies and Corpus Linguistics: Introducing the Pannonia Corpus. Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Philologica 9:3 ► pp. 99 ff.
Satthachai, Mali & Dorothy Kenny
Scarpa, Federica
2020. Theoretical Issues in Specialised Translation. In Research and Professional Practice in Specialised Translation, ► pp. 111 ff.
Simonnaes, Ingrid
2012. Zur korpusbasierten Erforschung von Fachübersetzungen bei der Nationalen Übersetzerprüfung in Norwegen. Meta 57:1 ► pp. 132 ff.
Sole-Mauri, Francina, Pilar Sánchez-Gijón & Antoni Oliver
2021. Cadlaws – An English–French Parallel Corpus of Legally Equivalent Documents. Mutatis Mutandis. Revista Latinoamericana de Traducción 14:2 ► pp. 494 ff.
Tekgül, Duygu
2019. Book club meetings as micro public spheres: translated literature and cosmopolitanism. Language and Intercultural Communication 19:5 ► pp. 380 ff.
Tekgül-Akın, Duygu
Tirkkonen-Condit, Sonja
2005. The Monitor Model Revisited: Evidence from Process Research. Meta 50:2 ► pp. 405 ff.
Verkerk, Annemarie
2017. The goal-over-source principle in European languages. In Space in Diachrony [Studies in Language Companion Series, 188], ► pp. 1 ff.
Vilinsky, BÁrbara
2012. On the lower frequency of occurrence of Spanish verbal periphrases in translated texts as evidence for the unique items hypothesis. Across Languages and Cultures 13:2 ► pp. 197 ff.
Volansky, V., N. Ordan & S. Wintner
2015. On the features of translationese. Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 30:1 ► pp. 98 ff.
Werner, Eberhard
2019. Science of Translation. In Handbook of the Changing World Language Map, ► pp. 1 ff.
Werner, Eberhard
2020. Science of Translation. In Handbook of the Changing World Language Map, ► pp. 3985 ff.
Whittaker, Sunniva
2004. Etude contrastive des syntagmes nominaux démonstratifs dans des textes traduits du français en norvégien et des textes sources norvégiens. FORUM. Revue internationale d’interprétation et de traduction / International Journal of Interpretation and Translation 2:2 ► pp. 221 ff.
Xiao, Richard & Xianyao Hu
2015. Exploring the Features of Translational Language. In Corpus-Based Studies of Translational Chinese in English-Chinese Translation [New Frontiers in Translation Studies, ], ► pp. 21 ff.
Zanettin, Federico
2013. Corpus Methods for Descriptive Translation Studies. Procedia - Social and Behavioral Sciences 95 ► pp. 20 ff.
Zanettin, Federico
2014. Corpora in Translation. In Translation: A Multidisciplinary Approach, ► pp. 178 ff.
Zhan, Juhong & Yue Jiang
2024. Testing the unique item hypothesis with phrasal verbs in Chinese–English translations of Lu Xun’s short stories: the perspective of translation directionality. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 11:1
Zhang, Xiaomin, Haidee Kotze (Kruger) & Jing Fang
2020. Explicitation in children’s literature translated from English to Chinese: a corpus-based study of personal pronouns. Perspectives 28:5 ► pp. 717 ff.
Špínová, Adéla
2018. Hypotéza unique items v překladu z angličtiny. AUC PHILOLOGICA 2018:2 ► pp. 117 ff.
[no author supplied]
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 14 april 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.