Cover not available
Article published In:
Indirect Translation and Sustainable Development
Edited by Jan Buts, Hanna Pięta, Laura Ivaska and James Hadley
[Translation Spaces 12:2] 2023
► pp. 255–284
Special Issue Article

Indirect translation and its influence on term variation

A pilot study on climate action

ORCID logo | Universidad de Granada
ORCID logo | Universidad de Granada

Term variation occurs when different designations are used to name the same concept. In institutional settings, such as the European Union, term variants multiply, partly as a result of the different languages and directions involved. Indirect translation is a recurrent practice in these multilingual contexts since it limits the number of language combinations, besides reducing costs and the need for translators. This paper describes how indirect translation via English has an influence on Spanish term variation in the European Union. We analyzed the EUR-Lex and Europarl English and Spanish corpora in Sketch Engine. The focus was on concepts related to Sustainable Development Goal 13: Climate Action, which are specifically addressed in these institutional corpora as a result of a long-standing environmental awareness. Our analysis indicates that indirect translation seems to have a subtle effect on term variants, since their proliferation seems to be mitigated when indirect translation is used.

Keywords: indirect translation, terminology, term variation, sustainable development goals, climate action, parallel corpora
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Term variation in translation
  • 3.Indirect translation
  • 4.Materials and methods
    • 4.1Selection of concepts related to SDGs
    • 4.2Extraction of term variants from EUR-Lex and Europarl
    • 4.3Identifying indirect translation in Europarl
  • 5.Results
    • 5.1Multilingualism and term translation variants
    • 5.2The influence of indirect translation on term variation
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 27 July 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/ts.22026.cab
References (62)
Aguirre Fernández-Bravo, Elena
2022 “Indirect interpreting: Stumbling block or stepping stone? Spanish booth perceptions of relay.” Target 34 (3): 512–536. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Baker, Mona
2003 Terminology, applications. In Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bautista Puig, Nuria
2019 SDG ontology. figshare. Dataset. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bhreathnach, Úna, Fionnuala Cloke, and Caoilfhionn Nic Pháidín
2013 Téarmaíocht don Aontas Eorpach. Taithí na hÉireann: Tionscadal GA IATE / Terminology for the European Union. The Irish Experience: The GA IATE Project. Cló Iar-Chonnacht, Ireland.Google Scholar
Bowker, Lynne, and Shane Hawkins
2006 “Variation in the organization of medical terms. Exploring some motivations for term choice.” Terminology 12 (1):79–110.Google Scholar
Brodie, Geraldine
2018 “Indirect translation on the London stage: Terminology and (in)visibility.” Translation Studies 11 (3): 333–348. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Bueno Maia, Rita
2010 “De como o Lázaro de Tormes e o Diabo Coxo entraram em Portugal e de como aí se apresentaram”. In Perfiles de la traducción hispano-portuguesa III, edited by Xosé Manuel Dasilva, 99–114. Vigo: Editorial Academia del Hispanismo.Google Scholar
Cabré, María Teresa
1993 La terminología. Teoría, metodología, aplicaciones. Barcelona: Antártida, Empúries.Google Scholar
Candel-Mora, Miguel Ángel, and María Luisa Carrió-Pastor
2012 “Corpus analysis: a pragmatic perspective on term variation.” RESLA (Revista Española de Lingüística Aplicada) 2012: 33–50.Google Scholar
Cartoni, Bruno, and Thomas Meyer
2012 “Extracting Directional and Comparable Corpora from a Multilingual Corpus for Translation Studies.” In Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’12), edited by Nicoletta Calzolari et al., 2132–2137. Istanbul: ELRA.Google Scholar
Cartoni, Bruno, Sandrine Zufferey, and Thomas Meyer
2013 “Using the Europarl corpus for cross-linguistic research.” Belgian journal of linguistics 271: 23–42. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Craith, Máiréad Nic
2006 Europe and the politics of language. Citizens, migrants and outsiders. Basingstoke: Palgrave McMillian.Google Scholar
de Swaan, Abram
2020 “The Unequal Exchange of Texts in World Language System.” In Bridging Linguistics and Economics, edited by Cécile B. Vigouroux and Salikoko S. Mufwene, 203–223. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Dollerup, Cay
2000 “Relay and Support Translations.” In Translation in Context: Selected Contributions from the EST Congress, edited by Andrew Chesterman, Natividad Gallardo, and Yves Gambier, 17–26. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Faber, Pamela
2009 “The cognitive shift in terminology and specialized translation.” MonTI. Monografías de Traducción e Interpretación 11: 107–134. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fernández-Silva, Sabela, and Koen Kerremans
2011 “Terminological variation in source texts and translations: a pilot study.” Meta 56 (2): 318–335. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Fernández-Silva, Sabela, Judit Freixa, and María Teresa Cabré
2009 “The multiple motivation in the denomination of concepts.” Journal of Terminology Science and Research 201: 1–24.Google Scholar
Fischer, Márta
2010 “Language (policy), translation and terminology in the European Union.” In Terminology in Everyday life, edited by Marcel Thelen and Frieda Steurs, 21–33. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Freixa, Judit
2006 “Causes of Denominative Variation in Terminology: A typology proposal.” Terminology 12 (1): 51–77. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Greenberg, Jane
2017 “Big Metadata, Smart Metadata, and Metadata Capital: Toward Greater Synergy between Data Science and Metadata.” Journal of Data and Information Science 2 (3): 19–36. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Hadley, James
2017 “Indirect Translation and Discursive Identity: Proposing the Concatenation Effect Hypothesis.” Translation Studies 10 (2): 183–197. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Heilbron, Johan
2010 “Structure and Dynamics of the World-System of Translations.” In International Symposium ‘Translation and Cultural Mediation’, Paris, February 22–23.Google Scholar
Hurtado Albir, Amparo
2001 Traducción y Traductología: Introducción a la traductología. Madrid: Cátedra.Google Scholar
Ivaska, Laura
2020 A mixed-methods approach to indirect translation: A case study of the Finnish translations of Modern Greek prose 1952–20. PhD Thesis. University of Turku.
2021. “A Mixed-Methods Approach to Indirect Translation: A Case Study of the Finnish Translations of Modern Greek Prose 1952–2004.” EST Newsletter 58 (13).Google Scholar
Jiménez-Crespo, Miguel Ángel, and Maribel Tercedor-Sánchez
2017 “Lexical variation, register and explicitation in medical translation: A comparable corpus study of medical terminology in US websites translated into Spanish.” Translation and Interpreting Studies 12 (3): 405–426. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kadiu, Silvia
2016 “David Bellos’ Indirect Translation of Ismail Kadare’s the File on H: A Contextual Analysis.” International Journal of Literary Linguistics 5 (3): 1–24. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Katsarova, Ivana
2011 The EU and Multilingualism. Library Briefing by the Library of the European Parliament. Available at: [URL]
Kerremans, Koen
2010 “A comparative study of terminological variation in specialised translation.” In Reconceptualizing LSP. Online proceedings of the XVII European LSP Symposium 2009, edited by Carmen Heine and Jan Engberg, 1–14. Aarhus: Aarhus UniversityGoogle Scholar
2016 “Variation in the translation of terms: corpus-driven terminology research.” In Translation and Meaning, edited by Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk et al., 217–227. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Kilgarriff, Adam, Vít Baisa, Jan Bušta, Miloš Jakubíček, Vojtěch Kovář, Jan Michelfeit, Pavel Rychlý, and Vít Suchomel
2014 “The Sketch Engine: ten years on.” Lexicography 1 (1): 7–36. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Kittel, Harald
1991 “Indirect Translation in Eighteenth-Century Germany.” In Interculturality and the Historical Study of Literary Translations, edited by Harald Kittel and Armin Frank, 3–25. Berlin: Eric Schmidt.Google Scholar
Koehn, Philipp
2005 “Europarl: A parallel corpus for statistical machine translation.” In Proceedings of the 10th machine translation summit 79–86. Phuket, Thailand: Asia-Pacific Association for Machine Translation.Google Scholar
Leal, Alice
2021 English and Translation in the European Union. Unity and Multiplicity in the Wake of Brexit. New York, Abingdon: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
León-Araúz, Pilar
2017 “Term and concept variation in specialized knowledge dynamics.” In Multiple Perspectives on Terminological Variation, edited by Patrick Drouin, Aline Francœur, John Humbley and Aurélie Picton, 213–258. Terminology and Lexicography Research and Practice, 18. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
León-Araúz, Pilar and Melania Cabezas-García
2020 “Term and translation variation of multiword terms.” MonTI. Monografías de Traducción e Interpretación, special issue 61:210–247. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
León-Araúz, Pilar
2022 “Terminology and equivalence.” In Theoretical Perspectives on Terminology: Explaining terms, concepts and specialized knowledge, edited by Pamela Faber and Marie-Claude L’Homme, 477–502. Terminology and Lexicography Research and Practice, 23. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
León-Araúz, Pilar, Melania Cabezas-García, and Arianne Reimerink
2020 “Representing Multiword Term Variation in a Terminological Knowledge Base: a Corpus-Based Study.” In Proceedings of the 12th Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2020), 2351–2360. Marseille: ELRA.Google Scholar
Marin-Lacarta, Maialen
2017 “Indirectness in literary translation: Methodological possibilities.” Translation Studies 10 (2): 133–149. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Miyata, Rei, and Kyo Kageura
2016 “Constructing and Evaluating Controlled Bilingual Terminologies.” In Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Computational Terminology (Computerm2016), 83–93. Osaka: ACL.Google Scholar
Newmark, Peter
1981 Approaches to Translation. Oxford: Pergamon.Google Scholar
Oziemblewska, Magdalena, and Agnieszka Szarkowska
2020 “The quality of templates in subtitling. A survey on current market practices and changing subtitler competences.” Perspectives 30 (3): 432–453. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Park, Kyung-Eun, Keun-Hye Shin, and Ki-Sun Kim
2015 “Research on Limitations of Indirect Literary Translation and Aspects of Cultural Vocabulary Translation.” Neohelicon 42 (2): 603–621. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Picton, Aurélie
2011 “Picturing short-term diachronic phenomena in specialized corpora. A textual terminology description of the dynamics of knowledge in space technologies.” Terminology 17 (1): 134–156.Google Scholar
Pięta, Hanna
2017 “Theoretical, methodological and terminological issues in researching indirect translation: A critical annotated bibliography.” Translation Studies 10 (2): 198–216. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2021 “Indirect translation.” In Handbook of translation studies 51, edited by Ives Gambier and Luc van Doorslaer, 113–119. John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
2019 “Indirect Translation: Main Trends in Practice and Research.” Slovo.ru: Baltic Accent 10 (1): 21–36. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Pięta, Hanna, Rita Bueno Maia, and Ester Torres-Simón
2022 Indirect Translation Explained. Abingdon, New York: Routledge. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Rabinovich, Ella
2018 A Computational Approach to the Study of Multilingualism. Ph.D. thesis.
Rogers, Margaret
1997 “Synonymy and equivalence in special-language texts. A case study in German and English texts on Genetic Engineering.” In Text Typology and Translation, edited by Anna Trosborg, 217–245. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sager, Juan C.
1990 A Practical Course in Terminology Processing. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
1994 Language Engineering and Translation. Consequences of Automation. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sanz-Vicente, Lara
2011 Análisis contrastivo de la terminología de la teledetección. La traducción de compuestos sintagmáticos nominales del inglés al español. PhD Thesis. Universidad de Salamanca.
Tercedor-Sánchez, Maribel, Clara Inés López Rodríguez, and Esperanza Alarcón Navío
2013 “Identifying translation features in multiword lexical units.” Belgian journal of linguistics 271: 87–109. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Torres-Simón, Ester, Hanna Pięta, Rita Bueno Maia, and Catarina Xavier
2021 “Indirect translation in translator training: Taking stock and looking ahead.” The Interpreter and Translator Trainer 15 (2): 260–281. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Toury, Gideon
1995 Descriptive Translation Studies – and Beyond. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Ustaszewski, Michael
2021 “Towards a machine learning approach to the analysis of indirect translation.” Translation Studies 14 (3): 313–331. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Vaisa, Vít, Jan Michelfeit, Marek Medved, and Miloš Jakubíček
2016 “European Union Language Resources in Sketch Engine.” In Proceedings of the Tenth International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC’16), 2799–2803. Portorož: ELRA.Google Scholar
van Rooyen, Marlie
2018 “Investigating translation flows: community radio news in South Africa.” Across Languages and Cultures 19 (2): 259–278. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
von Stackelberg, Jürgen
1984 Übersetzungen aus zweiter Hand: Rezeptionsvorgänge in der europäischen Literatur vom 14. bis zum 18. Jahrhundert. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Wüster, Eugen
1968 The Machine Tool. An Interlingual Dictionary of Basic Concepts. London: Technical Press.Google Scholar