Cover not available
Article published In:
Target
Vol. 30:2 (2018) ► pp.288–309

The editor’s invisibility

Analysing editorial intervention in translation

ORCID logo | Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Most corpus-based studies of translation use published texts as the basis for their corpus. This overlooks interventions by other agents involved in translation such as editors, who may have significant influence on the translated text. In order to study editors’ influence on the translation product, this paper presents a comparative analysis of manuscript and published translations, which allows a differentiation of actual translated language and edited translated language. Based on a tripartite parallel corpus of English business articles and their translations into German, I analyse translators’ and editors’ influence on grammatical metaphoricity of the text, specifically on the use of nominalisations. One finding is that a significant amount of nominalisation is re-verbalised by editors. The results show that translated language may often be the result of significant editorial intervention. Thus, by just considering source text and published translation, our picture of what translators actually do may be significantly distorted.

Keywords: editing, corpus-based translation studies, grammatical metaphor, nominalisations, translation workflow
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
    • 1.1Towards a holistic view of the translation workflow
    • 1.2Nominal and verbal style in English – German translation
  • 2.Studying editing in translation through corpora
  • 3.Grammatical metaphorisation in translation
    • 3.1Nominalisation and verbalisation as grammatical metaphor
    • 3.2Grammatical metaphor in contrastive analysis
    • 3.3Effects of grammatical metaphor on the translated text
  • 4.The manuscript corpus and method
  • 5.Metaphorisation patterns from source text to published translation
    • 5.1Quantitative findings
    • 5.2Discussion of the findings
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 21 March 2018
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/target.16116.bis
References
Abney, Steven P.
1987 The English Noun Phrase in its Sentential Aspect. PhD diss. Massachusetts Institute of Technology.Google Scholar
Alexiadou, Artemis, Gianina Iordăchioaia, and Florian Schäfer
2011 “Scaling the Variation in Romance and Germanic Nominalisations.” In The Noun Phrase in Romance and Germanic Structure, Variation and Change, edited by Petra Sleeman and Harry Perridon, 25–40. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Alves, Fabio, Adriana Pagano, Stella Neumann, Erich Steiner, and Silvia Hansen-Schirra
2010 “Translation Units and Grammatical Shifts: Towards an Integration of Product- and Process-Based Translation Research.” In Translation and Cognition, edited by Gregory M. Shreve and Erik Angelone, 109–142. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Andújar, Gemma
2016 “Traducción entregada frente a traducción publicada: Reflexiones sobre la normalización en traducción editorial a partir de un estudio de caso.” Meta 61 (2): 396–420. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Baker, Mona
1996 “Corpus-Based Translation Studies: The Challenges That Lie Ahead.” In Terminology, LSP and Translation: Studies in Language Engineering in Honour of Juan C. Sager, edited by Harold Somers, 175–186. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bisaillon, Jocelyne
2007 “Professional Editing Strategies Used by Six Editors.” Written Communication 24 (4): 295–322. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bisiada, Mario
2016 “ ‘Lösen Sie Schachtelsätze möglichst auf’: The Impact of Editorial Guidelines on Sentence Splitting in German Business Article Translations.” Applied Linguistics 37 (3): 354–376. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2017 “Translation and Editing: A Study of Editorial Treatment of Nominalisations in Draft Translations.” Perspectives: Studies in Translation Theory and Practice 26 (1): 24–38. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Coleman, Edmund B.
1964 “The Comprehensibility of Several Grammatical Transformations.” Journal of Applied Psychology 48 (3): 186–190. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Delaere, Isabelle
2015 Do Translations Walk the Line? Visually Exploring Translated and Non-Translated Texts in Search of Norm Conformity. PhD diss. Universiteit Gent.Google Scholar
Demske, Ulrike
2000 “Zur Geschichte der ung-Nominalisierung im Deutschen: Ein Wandel morphologischer Produktivität.” Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Sprache und Literatur 122 (3): 365–411. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Doherty, Monika
1991 “Informationelle Holzwege: Ein Problem der Übersetzungswissenschaft.” Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik 21 (84): 30–49.Google Scholar
Fabricius-Hansen, Cathrine
1999 “Information Packaging and Translation: Aspects of Translational Sentence Splitting (German – English/Norwegian).” In Sprachspezifische Aspekte der Informationsverteilung, edited by Monika Doherty, 175–214. Berlin: Akademie Verlag.Google Scholar
Fantinuoli, Claudio, and Federico Zanettin
2015 “Creating and Using Multilingual Corpora in Translation Studies.” In New Directions in Corpus-Based Translation Studies, edited by Claudio Fantinuoli and Federico Zanettin, 1–10. Berlin: Language Science Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Göpferich, Susanne
1995 Textsorten in Naturwissenschafien und Technik: Pragmatische Typologie – Kontrastierung – Translation. Tübingen: Günter Narr.Google Scholar
Gouadec, Daniel
2007 Translation as a Profession. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Halliday, Michael A. K.
1994 An Introduction to Functional Grammar. 2nd ed. London: Arnold.Google Scholar
Halliday, Michael A. K., and James R. Martin
1993 Writing Science: Literary and Discursive Power. London: Falmer.Google Scholar
Halliday, Michael A. K., and Christian M. I. M. Matthiessen
1999 Construing Experience through Meaning: A Language-Based Approach to Cognition. London: Continuum.Google Scholar
2004 An Introduction to Functional Grammar. 3rd ed. London: Arnold.Google Scholar
Hansen, Sandra, and Silvia Hansen-Schirra
2012 “Grammatical Shifts in English-German Noun Phrases.” In Cross-Linguistic Corpora for the Study of Translations: Insights from the Language Pair English-German, edited by Silvia Hansen-Schirra, Stella Neumann, and Erich Steiner, 133–145. Berlin: de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hansen, Silvia
2003 The Nature of Translated Text: An Interdisciplinary Methodology for the Investigation of the Specific Properties of Translation. PhD diss. Universität des Saarlandes.Google Scholar
Hansen-Schirra, Silvia
2011 “Between Normalization and Shining-Through: Specific Properties of English – German Translations and their Influence on the Target Language.” In Multilingual Discourse Production: Diachronic and Synchronic Perspectives, edited by Svenja Kranich, Viktor Becher, Steffen Höder, and Juliane House, 135–162. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hansen-Schirra, Silvia, Sandra Hansen, Sascha Wolfer, and Lars Konieczny
2009 “Fachkommunikation, Popularisierung, Übersetzung: Empirische Vergleiche am Beispiel der Nominalphrase im Englischen und Deutschen.” Linguistik online 39 (3): 109–118.Google Scholar
Harvey, Keith
2003 “ ‘Events’ and ‘Horizons’: Reading Ideology in the ‘Bindings’ of Translations.” In Apropos of Ideology, edited by María Calzada Pérez, 43–69. Manchester: St. Jerome.Google Scholar
Heyvaert, Liesbet
2003 “Nominalization as Grammatical Metaphor: On the Need for a Radically Systemic and Metafunctional Approach.” In Grammatical Metaphor: Views from Systemic Functional Linguistics, edited by Anne-Marie Vandenbergen, Miriam Taverniers, and Louise J. Ravelli, 65–100. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Houston, Ann
1989 “The English Gerund: Syntactic Change and Discourse Function.” In Language Change and Variation, edited by Ralph W. Fasold and Deborah Schiffrin, 173–196. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Jakobsen, Arnt L.
1999 “Logging Target Text Production with Translog.” In Probing the Process in Translation: Methods and Results, edited by Gyde Hansen, 9–20. Copenhagen: Samfundslitteratur.Google Scholar
Ko, Leong
2011 “Translation Checking: A View from the Translation Market.” Perspectives: Studies in Translatology 19 (2): 123–134. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Konšalová, Petra
2007 “Explicitation as a Universal in Syntactic De/condensation.” Across Languages and Cultures 8 (1): 17–32. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Krein-Kühle, Monika
2003 Equivalence in Scientific and Technical Translation: A Text-in-Context-Based Study. PhD diss. University of Salford.Google Scholar
Kruger, Haidee
2012 “A Corpus-Based Study of the Mediation Effect in Translated and Edited Language.” Target 24 (2): 355–388. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kunz, Kerstin
2010 Variation in English and German Nominal Coreference: A Study of Political Essays. Frankfurt/M.: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Mackenzie, J. Lachlan
1996 “English Nominalisations in the Layered Model of the Sentence.” In Complex Structures: A Functionalist Perspective, edited by Betty Devriendt, Louis Goossens, and Johan van der Auwera, 325–355. Berlin: de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Marcus, Mitchell P., Beatrice Santorini, and Mary Ann Marcinkiewicz
1993 “Building a Large Annotated Corpus of English: The Penn Treebank.” Computational Linguistics 19 (2): 313–330.Google Scholar
Mossop, Brian
2014 Revising and Editing for Translators. 3rd ed. Abingdon: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Müller-Feldmeth, Daniel, Uli Held, Peter Auer, Sandra Hansen-Morath, Silvia Hansen-Schirra, Karin Maksymski, Sascha Wolfer, and Lars Konieczny
2015 “Investigating Comprehensibility of German Popular Science Writing.” In Translation and Comprehensibility, edited by Karin Maksymski, Silke Gutermuth, and Silvia Hansen-Schirra, 227–261. Berlin: Frank & Timme.Google Scholar
Muñoz Martín, Ricardo
2010 “On Paradigms and Cognitive Translatology.” In Translation and Cognition, edited by Gregory M. Shreve and Erik Angelone, 169–187. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Neef, Martin
1999 “A Declarative Approach to Conversion into Verbs in German.” In Yearbook of Morphology 1998, edited by Geert Booij and Jaap van Marle, 199–224. Dordrecht: Kluwer. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Norberg, Ulf
2003 Übersetzen mit doppeltem Skopos: Eine empirische Prozess- und Produktstudie. Uppsala: Uppsala University.Google Scholar
Palumbo, Giuseppe
2008 Translating Science: An Empirical Investigation of Grammatical Metaphor as a Source of Difficulty for a Group of Translation Trainees in English – Italian Translation. PhD diss. University of Surrey.Google Scholar
Rasmussen, Kirsten Wølch, and Anne Schjoldager
2011 “Revising Translations: A Survey of Revision Policies in Danish Translation Companies.” The Journal of Specialised Translation 111: 87–120.Google Scholar
Ravelli, Louise J.
1988 “Grammatical Metaphor: An Initial Analysis.” In Pragmatics, Discourse and Text: Some Systemically Inspired Approaches, edited by Erich Steiner and Robert Veltman, 135–147. London: Frances Pinter.Google Scholar
Rumpeltes, Kerstin
In preparation. Microanalysis of Translations of -ing-Clauses as Subjects in the Register ESSAY. PhD diss. University of Saarbrücken.
Rüth, Lisa
2012 Grammatische Metapher und Common Ground. Master’s diss. Johannes-​Gutenberg-Universität Mainz.Google Scholar
Saldanha, Gabriela, and Sharon O’Brien
2013 Research Methodologies in Translation Studies. Abingdon: Routledge.Google Scholar
Schiller, Anne, Simone Teufel, Christine Stöckert, and Christine Thielen
1999 Guidelines für das Tagging deutscher Textcorpora mit STTS. [URL].
Schmid, Helmut
1995 “Improvements in Part-of-Speech Tagging with an Application to German.” Proceedings of the ACL SIGDAT-Workshop: 1–9.Google Scholar
Shin, Soo-Song
2006 “On the Event Structure of -ung Nominals in German.” Linguistics 39 (2): 297–319.Google Scholar
Steiner, Erich
2001 “Translations English – German: Investigating the Relative Importance of Systemic Contrasts and of the Text-Type ‘Translation’.” SPRIKreports 7:1–48.Google Scholar
2004 “Ideational Grammatical Metaphor: Exploring Some Implications for the Overall Model.” Languages in Contrast 4 (1): 137–164. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Taverniers, Miriam
2003 “Grammatical Metaphor in SFL: A Historiography of the Introduction and Initial Study of the Concept.” In Grammatical Metaphor: Views from Systemic Functional Linguistics, edited by Anne-Marie Vandenbergen, Miriam Taverniers, and Louise J. Ravelli, 5–33. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Teich, Elke
2003 Cross-Linguistic Variation in System and Text. Berlin: de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Utka, Andrius
2004 “Phases of Translation Corpus: Compilation and Analysis.” International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 9 (2): 195–224. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 10 other publications

Bisiada, Mario
2019. Translated Language or Edited Language? A Study of Passive Constructions in Translation Manuscripts and their Published Versions. Across Languages and Cultures 20:1 ► pp. 35 ff. DOI logo
Chen, Shukun, Aiping Mo & Shu Yang
2023. ‘We should have a deep understanding’: reinstantiating cognitive processes in the translation of Chinese political discourse. Perspectives ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Nádvorníková, Olga
2020. Differences in the lexical variation of reporting verbs in French, English and Czech fiction and their impact on translation. Languages in Contrast 20:2 ► pp. 209 ff. DOI logo
Nádvorníková, Olga
2021. Contexts and Consequences of Sentence Splitting in Translation (English-French-Czech). Research in Language 19:3 ► pp. 229 ff. DOI logo
Pang, Shuangzi & Kefei Wang
2023. Sketching the changing patterns in kaleidoscopes: New developments in corpus-based studies of translation features (2001–2021). Research in Corpus Linguistics 11:2 ► pp. 79 ff. DOI logo
Pleyer, Monika
2023. Chapter 4. Impoliteness and pragmatic preferences in German translations of British and Irish children’s fiction. In Pragmatics and Translation [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 337], ► pp. 74 ff. DOI logo
Valencia Giraldo, M. Victoria, María Ángeles Recio Ariza & Gloria Corpas Pastor
2021. Über die Terminologie der Merkmale der übersetzten Sprache: Normen, Universalien oder Übersetzungsgesetze?. Lebende Sprachen 66:2 ► pp. 325 ff. DOI logo
Wang, Hui
2022. The Micro-Model: A Linguistic Approach to Textual Mediation in Translation. In Discursive Mediation in Translation, ► pp. 47 ff. DOI logo
Xuan, Winfred Wenhui & Shukun Chen
2019. A synthesis of research on grammatical metaphor: meta-data and content analysis. <i>WORD</i> 65:4 ► pp. 213 ff. DOI logo
[no author supplied]
2023. Theme in English and German [Studies in Corpus Linguistics, 112], DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 8 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.