Cover not available
Article published In:
Target
Vol. 25:2 (2013) ► pp.252–275

Is there interference of usage constraints?

A frequency study of existential there is and its French equivalent il y a in translated vs. non-translated texts

| University of Lille, France
| University of Lille, France
We examine the possible impact of frequency differences between a construction in L1 and its equivalent in L2 on translations. Our case is that of existential there in English and existential il y a in French. Using corpus evidence, we first confirm previous claims that existential there is used more freely in English than existential il y a is in French. Drawing on extensive counts conducted in available corpora and self-compiled samples of translated English and French, intra-language comparisons of translated and non-translated language use show that existential there is under-represented in English translated from French while existential il y a is over-represented in French translated from English. It is suggested that source-language interference is responsible for these differences. In addition, counts of existentials in individual novels and their translations show that inter-language frequency shifts systematically occur in the direction of target-language norms, most clearly so for translations into French, which suggests that the observed usage constraint on il y a still applies to a noticeable extent in translated French. Methodologically, we argue the need for a large corpus of translated French.
Keywords: corpus-based translation studies, usage constraint, source-language, interference, existential construction, English, French, frequency, targetlanguage norms, translation universals, methodology
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Method
    • 2.1Design
    • 2.2Materials
      • 2.2.1Electronic corpora
      • 2.2.2Self-collected corpora
    • 2.3Procedure
  • 3.Results and discussion
    • 3.1Inter-language comparison: Non-translated English vs. non-translated French
    • 3.2Intra-language comparison: Non-translated vs. translated English and French
      • 3.2.1Non-translated vs. translated English
      • 3.2.2Non-translated vs. translated French
    • 3.3Comparison of electronic and self-collected corpora
    • 3.4Novel-by-novel comparison: original versus translation
  • 4.Conclusion and further prospects
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 17 May 2013
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/target.25.2.05cap
References (38)
References
Baker, Mona. 1993. “Corpus Linguistics and Translation Studies: Implications and Applications.” In Text and Technology, ed. by Mona Baker, Gill Francis, and Elena Tognini-Bonelli, 233–250. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.   DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 1995. “Corpora in Translation Studies: An Overview and Some Suggestions for Future Research.” Target 7 (2): 223–243.   DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 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, ed. by Harold Somers, 175–196. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.   DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Baker, Mona, and Maeve Olohan. 2000. “Reporting that in Translated English: Evidence for Subconscious Processes of Explicitation?” Across Languages and Cultures 1 (2): 141–158.   DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ballard, Michel. 2003 / 2004. Versus: la version réfléchie (21 vol.). Gap-Paris: Ophrys.Google Scholar
Bergen, Benjamin K., and Madelaine C. Plauché. 2005. “The Convergent Evolution of Radial Constructions: French and English Deictics and Existential.” Cognitive Linguistics 16 (1): 1–42.   DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Birner, Betty J., and Gregory Ward. 1998. Information Status and Noncanonical Word Order. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.   DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cappelle, Bert. 2012. “English Is Less Rich in Manner-of-Motion Verbs When Translated from French.” Across Languages and Cultures 13, (2): 173–195.   DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chesterman, Andrew. 2007. “What is a Unique Item?” In Doubts and Directions in Translation Studies, ed. byYves Gambier, Miriam Shlesinger, and Radegundis Stolze, 3–13. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.   DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chuquet, Hélène, and Michel Paillard. 1987. Approche linguistique des problèmes de traduction anglais-français. Paris: Ophrys.Google Scholar
Corpas Pastor, Gloria, Ruslan Mitkov, Naveed Afzal, and Viktor Pekar. 2008. “Translation Universals: Do they Exist? A Corpus-based NLP Study of Convergence and Simplification” Proceedings of the Eighth Conference of the Association for Machine Translation in the Americas (AMTA-08). Waikiki, Hawaii.Google Scholar
Davies, Mark. 2004. BYU-BNC: The British National Corpus. Available online at [URL].
De Sutter, Gert, and Marc Van de Velde. 2010. “Do the Mechanisms that Govern Syntactic Choices Differ between Original and Translated Language? A Corpus-based Translation Study of PP Extraposition in Dutch and German.” In Using Corpora in Contrastive and Translation Studies, ed. by Richard Xiao, 144–163. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.Google Scholar
Frawley, William. 1984. “Prolegomenon to a Theory of Translation.” In Translation: Literary, Linguistic and Philosophical Perspectives, ed. by , 250–263. Newark: University of Delaware Press.Google Scholar
Grevisse, Maurice. 1986. Le bon usage, 12th edition by André Goosse. Paris: Duculot.Google Scholar
Grevisse, Maurice, and André Goosse. 1989. Nouvelle grammaire Française. Paris-Louvain la Neuve: Duculot.Google Scholar
Guillemin-Flescher, Jacqueline. 1981. Syntaxe comparée du français et de l’anglais, Problèmes de traduction. Gap-Paris: Ophrys.Google Scholar
House, Juliane. 2001. “How Do We Know When a Translation is Good?” In Exploring Translation and Multilingual Text Production: Beyond Content, ed. byErich Steiner, and Colin Yallop, 127–160. Berlin-New York: Mouton de Gruyter.   DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2008. “Beyond Intervention: Universals in Translation.” Trans-kom 11: 6–19.Google Scholar
Jiménez-Crespo, Miguel A. 2010. “The Future of “Universal” Tendencies: A Review of Papers Using Localized Websites.” Talk given at the UCCTS 2010 Conference, Edge Hill University, 27–29 July 2010.Google Scholar
Lambrecht, Knud. 1994. Information Structure and Sentence Form: Topic, Focus and the Mental Representation of Discourse Referents. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.   DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2000. “Prédication seconde et structure informationnelle: la relative de perception comme structure présentative.” Langue Française 1271: 49–66.   DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Laviosa, Sara. 2002. Corpus-based Translation Studies: Theory, Findings, Applications. Amsterdam: Rodopi.Google Scholar
. 1998. “Core Patterns of Lexical Use in a Comparable Corpus of English Narrative Prose.” Meta 43 (4): 557–570.   DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Laviosa-Braithwaite, Sara. 1996. The English Comparable Corpus (ECC): A Resource and a Methodology for the Empirical Study of Translation. Unpublished PhD Thesis, Department of Language Engineering, UMIST, Manchester.Google Scholar
. 1997. “Investigating Simplification in an English Comparable Corpus of Newspaper Articles.” In Transferre Necesse Est. Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Current Trends in Studies of Translation and Interpreting, 5–7 September 1996, Budapest, Hungary, ed. by Kinga Klaudy, and Janos Kohn, 531–540. Budapest: Scholastica.Google Scholar
Loock, Rudy. 2009. “Parce qu’en plus il faut traduire la syntaxe ?!’: contraintes et stratégies dans la traduction de la structuration d’un texte.” In La forme comme paradigme du traduire, ed. by Nadia D’Amélio, 173–190. Mons: CIPA.Google Scholar
. 2010. “Using Corpora to Define Target-Language Use in Translation.” Talk given at the UCCTS 2010 Conference, Edge Hill University, 27–29 July 2010.Google Scholar
Mauranen, Anna, and Kujamäki Pekka (eds.). 2004. Translation Universals. Do they Exist?. Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins.   DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mauranen, Anna. 2004. “Corpora, universals and interference.” In Translation Universals: Do they Exist?, ed. by Anna Mauranen, and Pekka Kujamäki, 65–82. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.   DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Olohan, Maeve. 2003. “How Frequent are the Contractions?” Target 15 (1): 59–89.   DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Slobin, Dan I. 2004. “The many ways to search for a frog. Linguistic typology and the expression of motion events.” In Relating events in narrative: Typological and contextual perspectives, ed. by Sven Strömqvist, and Ludo Verhoeven, 219–257. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.Google Scholar
Talmy, Leonard. 1991. “Path to realization: a typology of event integration.” Buffalo working papers in linguistics 911: 1–47.Google Scholar
Teubert, Wolfgang. 1996. “Comparable or parallel corpora?” International Journal of Lexicography 91: 238–264.   DOI logoGoogle Scholar
. 2004. “Unique Items — Over- or Under-Represented in Translated Language?.” In Translation Universals: Do they Exist?, ed. byAnna Mauranen, and Pekka Kujamäki. 177–184. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.   DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Toury, Gideon. 1995. Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.   DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Vinay, Jean-Paul, and Jean Darbelnet. 1995. Comparative Stylistics of French and English, a Methodology for Translation, translated and ed. by Juan C. Sager, and Marie-Josée Hamel. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.   DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by (12)

Cited by 12 other publications

Cai, Yingying & Hendrik De Smet
2024. Are categories’ cores more isomorphic than their peripheries?. Frontiers in Communication 9 DOI logo
Chen, Jiaxin, Dechao Li & Kanglong Liu
2024. Unraveling cognitive constraints in constrained languages: a comparative study of syntactic complexity in translated, EFL, and native varieties. Language Sciences 102 ► pp. 101612 ff. DOI logo
Zhang, Xiaomin, Haidee Kotze & Jing Fang
2023. Hyper-conventional, unconventional, or “just right”? The interplay of normalisation and cross-linguistic influence in the use of modal particles in translated Chinese children’s literature. Meta 67:2 ► pp. 384 ff. DOI logo
Li, Tao & Kaibao Hu
2021. Corpus-Based Translation Studies and Political Discourse Analysis. In Reappraising Self and Others [Corpora and Intercultural Studies, 6], ► pp. 13 ff. DOI logo
Granger, Sylviane & Marie-Aude Lefer
2020. Introduction. Languages in Contrast 20:2 ► pp. 167 ff. DOI logo
Henkel, Daniel
2020. The Conditional Perfect, A Quantitative Analysis in English-French Comparable-Parallel Corpora. In Text Analytics [Studies in Classification, Data Analysis, and Knowledge Organization, ], ► pp. 179 ff. DOI logo
Lefer, Marie-Aude
2020. Parallel Corpora. In A Practical Handbook of Corpus Linguistics, ► pp. 257 ff. DOI logo
Loock, Rudy
2019. Traduction automatique et usage linguistique : une analyse de traductions anglais-français réunies en corpus. Meta 63:3 ► pp. 786 ff. DOI logo
Jiang, Zhanhao & Yuan Tao
2017. Translation Universals of Discourse Markers in Russian-to-Chinese Academic Texts: A Corpus-based Approach. Zeitschrift für Slawistik 62:4 ► pp. 583 ff. DOI logo
Tao, Yuan & Zhanhao Jiang
2017. Translation universals of kak structures: a corpus-based approach. Russian Linguistics 41:1 ► pp. 61 ff. DOI logo
Defrancq, Bart & Gudrun Rawoens
2016. Assessing morphologically motivated transfer in parallel corpora. Target. International Journal of Translation Studies 28:3 ► pp. 372 ff. DOI logo
Kruger, Haidee & Bertus van Rooy
2016. Syntactic and pragmatic transfer effects in reported-speech constructions in three contact varieties of English influenced by Afrikaans. Language Sciences 56 ► pp. 118 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 10 july 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.