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Article published In:
Target
Vol. 28:3 (2016) ► pp.399–423

Understanding translation as a site of language contact

The potential of the Code-Copying Framework as a descriptive mechanism in translation studies

| University of Birmingham

This paper begins by acknowledging translation as an important site of language contact and its primary aim is to reinterpret a theoretical framework from the field of language contact, namely Johanson’s Code-Copying Framework (1993, 1999, 2002a), with translation in mind. The framework is then systematically applied to empirical data and a corpus-based study is conducted, using the translation of popular science articles from English into Greek as a case in point, and in particular examining any change in the frequency of passive voice reporting verbs. The discussion and corpus analysis suggest that the Code-Copying Framework offers a new vantage point for understanding translation as facilitating linguistic development in the target language, and that translation studies can benefit from adopting it as a descriptive mechanism when comparing instances of contact through translation across languages.

Keywords: language change, corpus-based translation studies, passive voice, English-Greek, popular science, reporting verbs
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The Code-Copying Framework
    • 2.1Code-Copying
    • 2.2Applying the Code-Copying Framework to translation
  • 3.The study of Greek Popular Science
    • 3.1Popular science
    • 3.2The TROY corpus
    • 3.3Method
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Diachronic corpus analysis
    • 4.2Comparable corpus analysis
    • 4.3Parallel corpus analysis
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 29 September 2016
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/target.28.3.03mal
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