Cover not available
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
References
Aitchison, Jean
2001 Language Change: Progress or Decay? 3rd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Amouzadeh, Mohammad, and Juliane House
2010 “Translation as a Language Contact Phenomenon.” Languages in Contrast 101: 54–75. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Apostolou-Panara, Athena-Maria
1991 “English Loanwords in Modern Greek: An Overview.” Terminologie et Traduction 1 (1): 45–60.Google Scholar
1999 “ΓλωσσικήΜεταρρύθμιση και Εξωτερικός Δανεισμός: Η περίπτωση τηςΝέας Ελληνικής [Language reform and external borrowing: The case of Modern Greek].” In Συνέδριογια τηνΕλληνικήΓλώσσα 1976-1996: Είκοσιχρόνια από την καθιέρωσητηςΝεοελληνικής (Δημοτικής) ως επίσημηςγλώσσας [Conference on the Modern Greek language 1976-1996: Twenty years from the establishment of Modern Greek (Demotic) as an official language], 333–341. Athens: Tsiveriotis. Google Scholar
Backus, Ad, and Anna Verschik
2012 “Copiability of (Bound) Morphology.” In Copies versus Cognates in Bound Morphology, ed. by Lars Johanson, and Martine Robbeets, 123–150. Leiden: Brill. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ballard, Michel
2003 Versus: La version réfléchie [Versus: The reflected version]. Paris: Ophrys.Google Scholar
Baumgarten, Nicole, and Demet Özçetin
2008 “Linguistic Variation through Language Contact in Translation.” In Language Contact and Contact Language, ed. by Peter Siemund, and Noemi Kintana, 293–316. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Becher, Victor, Juliane House, and Svenja Kranich
2009 “Convergence and Divergence of Communicative Norms through Language Contact in Translation.” In Convergence and Divergence in Language Contact Situations, ed. by Kurt Braunmüller, and Juliane House, 125–152. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Becher, Viktor
2011 Explicitation and Implicitation: A Corpus-Based Study of English-German and German-English Translations of Business Texts. PhD thesis University of Hamburg.Google Scholar
Bennett, Karen
2007a “Epistimicide! The Tale of a Predatory Discourse.” The Translator 13 (2): 151–169. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2007b “Galileo’s Revenge: Ways of Construing Knowledge and Translation Strategies in the Era of Globalization.” Social Semiotics 17 (2): 171–193. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Biber, Douglas, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad, and Edward Finegan
1999 Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Harlow: Longman.Google Scholar
Bloch, Joel
2010 “A Concordance-Based Study of the Use of Reporting Verbs as Rhetorical Devices in Academic Papers.” Journal of Writing Research 2 (2): 219–244. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Boeschoten, Hendrik
1999 “Equivalence and Level of Analysis.” In Language Encounters Across Time and Space, ed. by Bernt Brendemoen, Elizabeth Lanza, and Else Ryen, 63–71. Oslo: Novus Press.Google Scholar
Bybee, Joan L., and Paul J. Hopper
eds. 2001 Frequency and the Emergence of Linguistic Structure. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Clyne, Michael
2003 Dynamics of Language Contacts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Csató, Éva Á.
2002 “Karaim: A High-Copying Language.” In Language Change: The Interplay of Internal, External and Extra-Linguistic Factors, ed. by Mari C. Jones, and Edith Esch, 315-327. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dardano, Maurizio
1986 “The Influence of English in Italian.” In English in Contact with Other Languages: Studies in Honour of Broder Carstensen on the Occasion of his 60th Birthday, ed. by Wolfgang Viereck, and Wolf-Dietrich Bald, 231-252. Budapest: Kiadó.Google Scholar
Floyd, Alan
2000 “The Reporting Verbs and Bias in the Press.” Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses 131:43–52. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Frawley, William
1984 “Prolegomenon to a Theory of Translation.” In Translation: Literary, Linguistic, and Philological Perspectives, ed. by William Frawley, 159-175. London: Associated University Press.Google Scholar
Gellerstam, Martin
2005 “Fingerprints in Translation.” In In and Out of English: For Better, for Worse?, ed. by Gunilla Anderman, and Margaret Rogers, 201-213. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Heine, Bernd, and Tania Kuteva
2005 Language Contact and Grammatical Change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
House, Juliane
2003 “English as a Lingua Franca: A Threat to Multilingualism?” Journal of Sociolinguistics 7 (4): 556–578. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2006 “Covert Translation, Language Contact, Variation and Change.” SYNAPS 191:25–47.Google Scholar
2008 “Global English and the Destruction of Identity?” In Translation Selves: Experience and Identity between Languages and Literatures, ed. by Paschalis Nikolaou, and Maria-Venetia Kyritsi, 87-107. London: Continuum.Google Scholar
2011 “Using Translation and Parallel Text Corpora to Investigate the Influence of Global English on Textual Norms in Other Languages.” In Corpus-Based Translation Studies: Research and Applications, ed. by Alet Kruger, Kim Wallmach, and Jeremy Munday, 187-208. London: Bloomsbury.Google Scholar
Hundt, Marianne, and Geoffrey Leech
2012 “ ‘Small Is Beautiful’: On the Value of Standard Reference Corpora for Observing Recent Grammatical Change.” In The Oxford Handbook of the History of English, ed. by Terttu Nevalainen, and Elizabeth Traugott, 175-188. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Hyland, Ken
1999 “Academic Attribution: Citation and the Construction of Disciplinary Knowledge.” Applied Linguistics 20 (3): 341–367. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Johanson, Lars
1993 “Code-Copying in Immigrant Turkish.” In Immigrant Languages in Europe, ed. by Guus Extra, and Ludo Verhoeven, 197-221. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.Google Scholar
1998 “Code-Copying in Irano-Turkic.” Language Sciences 20 (3): 325–337. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1999 “The Dynamics of Code-Copying in Language Encounters.” In Language Encounters Across Time and Space, ed. by Bernt Brendemoen, Elizabeth Lanza, and Else Ryen, 37-61. Oslo: Novus Press.Google Scholar
2002a Structural Factors in Turkic Language Contacts. London: Curzon.Google Scholar
2002b “Contact-Induced Change in a Code-Copying Framework.” In Language Change: The Interplay of Internal, External and Extra-Linguistic Factors, ed. by Mari C. Jones, and Edith Esch, 285-313. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2008 “Remodelling Grammar: Copying, Conventionalization, Grammaticalization.” In Language Contact and Contact Languages, ed. by Peter Siemund, and Noemi Kintana, 61-79. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Klairis, Christos, and Georgios Babiniotis
(1998) 2005 Γραμματική της Νέας Ελληνικής: Δομολειτουργική-επικοινωνιακή [Modern Greek grammar: Structural-functional-communicative]. 3rd edition. Athens: Ellinika Grammata.Google Scholar
Kranich, Svenja, Victor Becher, and Steffen Höder
2011 “A Tentative Typology of Translation-Induced Language Change.” In Multilingual Discourse Production, ed. by Kranich, Svenja, Victor Becher, Steffen Höder, and Juliane House, 9-44. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kranich, Svenja, Victor Becher, and Juliane House
2012 “Changing Conventions in English-German Translation of Popular Scientific Texts.” In Multilingual Individuals and Multilingual Societies, ed. by Kurt Braunmüller, Christoph Gabriel, and Barbara Hänel-Faulhaber, 315-334. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Labov, William
1981 “What Can Be Learned about Change in Progress from Synchronic Description?” In Variation Omnibus, ed. by David Sankoff, and Henrietta Cedergren, 177-200. Edmonton: Linguistic Research.Google Scholar
Larsson, Lars-Gunnar
2001 “Baltic Influence on Finnic Languages.” In Circum-Baltic Languages: Volume I: Past and Present, ed. by Östen Dahl, and Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm, 237-253. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Mair, Christian
2009 “Corpora and the Study of Recent Change in Language.” In Corpus Linguistics: An International Handbook, ed. by Anke Lüdeling, and Merja Kytö, 1109-1125. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Marmaridou, Sophia
1987 “Semantic and Pragmatic Parameters of Meaning: On the Interface between Contrastive Text Analysis and the Production of Translated Texts.” Journal of Pragmatics 111:721–736. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
McEnery, Tony, Richard Xiao, and Yukio Tono
2006 Corpus-Based Language Studies. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
McLaughlin, Mairi
2011 Syntactic Borrowing in Contemporary French: A Linguistic Analysis of News Translation. Oxford: Legenda.Google Scholar
Musacchio, Maria Teresa
2005 “The Influence of English on Italian: The Case of Translations of Economic Articles.” In In and Out of English: For Better, for Worse?, ed. by Gunilla Anderman, and Margaret Rogers, 71-96. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Oakes, Michael
1998 Statistics for Corpus Linguistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.Google Scholar
Pratt, Chris
1980 El Anglicismo en el Español Peninsular Contemporáneo [Anglicisms in contemporary peninsular Spanish]. Mardid: Gredos.Google Scholar
Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, and Jan Svartvik
1985 A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman.Google Scholar
Sifianou, Maria
2010 “The Announcements in the Athens Metro Stations: An Example of Glocalization?” Intercultural Pragmatics 7 (1): 25–46. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Silva-Corvalán, Carmen
1994 Language Contact and Change: Spanish in Los Angeles. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
Steiner, Erich
2008 “Empirical Studies of Translations as a Mode of Language Contact: ‘Explicitness’ of Lexicogrammatical Encoding as a Relevant Dimension.” In Language Contact and Contact Languages, ed. by Peter Siemund, and Noemi Kintana, 317-345. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Thomason, Sarah
2001 Language Contact: An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Toury, Gideon
1995 Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Verschik, Anna
2008 Emerging Bilingual Speech: From Monolingualism to Code-Copying. London: Continuum.Google Scholar
Warburton, Irene
1970 On the Verb in Modern Greek. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
1975 “The Passive in English and Greek.” Foundations of Language 13 (4): 563–578.Google Scholar
Weinreich, Uriel
1953 Languages in Contact: Findings and Problems. New York: Linguistic Circle of New York.Google Scholar
Winford, Donald
2005 “Contact-Induced Changes: Classification and Processes.” Diachronica 22 (2): 373–427. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Cited by

Cited by 8 other publications

Clay, Edward & Karen Mcauliffe
2021. Reconceptualising the Third Space of Legal Translation: A Study of the Court of Justice of the European Union. Comparative Legilinguistics 45:1 ► pp. 93 ff. DOI logo
Havumetsä, Nina
2023. Lexical borrowing in journalism in a time of political crisis. Perspectives ► pp. 1 ff. DOI logo
Malamatidou, Sofia
2017. Why changes go unnoticed: The role of adaptation in translation-induced linguistic change. Lingua 200 ► pp. 22 ff. DOI logo
Maurais, Jean
2021. Language Contact, Cognition, and Cross-Linguistic Influence in the Greek Pentateuch. Journal for the Study of Judaism 53:3 ► pp. 317 ff. DOI logo
Qiu, Bing
2018. Exploring and Analyzing the Contact-Induced Semantic Transferring Cases Based on a Sanskrit-Chinese Parallel Corpus. In Chinese Lexical Semantics [Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 11173], ► pp. 167 ff. DOI logo
Sidiropoulou, Maria
2021. Im/politeness in Translated Academic Discourse. In Understanding Im/politeness Through Translation [Advances in (Im)politeness Studies, ], ► pp. 53 ff. DOI logo
van Rooy, Bertus & Haidee Kotze
2021. Contrast, Contact, Convergence? Afrikaans and English Modal Auxiliaries in South African Parliamentary Discourse (1925–1985). Contrastive Pragmatics 3:2 ► pp. 159 ff. DOI logo
Verschik, Anna & Helin Kask
2021. English-Estonian code-copying: Comparing blogs and vlogs. Applied Linguistics Review 12:2 ► pp. 249 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 28 april 2023. 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.