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Article published In:
The Known Unknowns of Translation Studies
Edited by Elke Brems, Reine Meylaerts and Luc van Doorslaer
[Target 24:1] 2012
► pp. 43–60

More spoken or more translated?

Exploring a known unknown of simultaneous interpreting

| Bar-Ilan University, Israel
| University of Haifa, Israel

Since the early 1990s, with the advance of computerized corpora, translation scholars have been using corpus-based methodologies to look into the possible existence of overriding patterns (tentatively described as universals or as laws) in translated texts. The application of such methodologies to interpreted texts has been much slower in developing than in the case of translated ones, but significant progress has been made in recent years. After presenting the fundamental methodological hurdles—and advantages—of working on machine-readable (transcribed) oral corpora, we present and discuss several recent studies using cross-modal comparisons, and examine the viability of using interpreted outputs to explore the features that set simultaneous interpreting apart from other forms of translation. We then set out to test the hypothesis that modality may exert a stronger effect than ontology—i.e. that being oral (vs. written) is a more powerful influence than being translated (vs. original).

Keywords: interpreting, translation, cross-modal comparison, modality, corpusbased translation studies
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Overcoming the hurdles: Recent developments in corpus-based interpreting studies
  • 3.Two studies of modality vs. ontology
    • 3.1Study 1 (experimental data): The effects of modality
    • 3.2Study 2 (authentic data): The effects of modality vs. ontology
    • 3.3Method and findings
      • Parts of speech (POS)
      • Type-token ratios (TTR)
  • 4.Discussion
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Appendix
  • References
Published online: 7 September 2012
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/target.24.1.04shl
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