Translator awareness of semantic prosodies

Helle Dam-Jensen and Karen Korning Zethsen
Århus School of Business, University of Århus
Abstract

An increasing amount of linguistic corpus-based research is being carried out and especially within semantics, some groundbreaking results are highly relevant to Translation Studies. Research has shown that evaluation in language is very much anchored in extended lexical units and not merely in the lexeme. Corpusbased semantic profiles of words reveal evaluative features which may not be accessible through introspection and which have therefore not been part of dictionary information. Previous empirical research has almost exclusively been concerned with native speakers of English. The present study, however, tests and compares the awareness of these evaluative features in the behaviour of soonto-be translators and first year LSP English students when using their foreign language.

Keywords:
Table of contents

... and what is to be said about the half-silent connotations, which alter the best-defined denotations of the original vocabulary, and which drift, as it were, between the signs, the sentences, the sequences whether short or long.

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