Translation universals: a usage-based approach

The language used in translated texts is said to differ from the language used in other communicative contexts. Translation-specific linguistic behaviour (translation universals) has been shown to explain those differences at the levels of syntax, lexicon, discourse, and semantics. Scholars seem to disagree as to the roots of this behaviour - some turn to socio-cultural and economic factors such as risk-avoidance while others argue that cognitive processing inherent in translation and unique to it affects the linguistic choices made by translators. The aim of this thesis is to shed new light on translation universals from a usage-based perspective. The plausibility of universal translational behaviour is assessed with reference to what we know about implicit and explicit linguistic knowledge: how it is acquired and how it affects language use. I argue that there is little support for the idea that the process of translation constrains the linguistic choices of translators. Instead, I will show that the differences between translated and non-translated texts observed in many studies, which have been attributed to translation universals, are likely to result from differences between the content of translated and non-translated components of comparable corpora. My hypothesis is supported with corpus and experimental evidence which shows that differences in the use of modality and aspect in translated and non-translated Polish texts can be explained with frequency effects: the two corpora contain different verbs whose frequency of occurrence affects translators' and authors' aspectual choices, resulting in the observed differences. The thesis has important methodological and theoretical implications for Translation Studies. First, it shows the importance of looking at the comparability of comparable corpora before turning to translation universals to explain the linguistic choices made in translation. Second, it casts doubt on the plausibility of translation universals as a factor in linguistic decision-making in translation and thereby simplifies the theoretical account needed to explain choices in translation

Less is more: possibility and necessity as centres of gravity in a usage-based classification of core modals in Polish

In this paper we present the results of an empirical study into the cognitive reality of existing classifications of modality using Polish data. We analyzed random samples of 250 independent observations for the 7 most frequent modal words (móc, można, musieć, należy, powinien, trzeba, wolno), extracted from the Polish national corpus. Observations were annotated for modal type according to a number of classifications, including van der Auwera and Plungian (1998), as well as for morphological, syntactic and semantic properties using the Behavioral Profiling approach (Divjak and Gries 2006). Multiple correspondence analysis and (polytomous) regression models were used to determine how well modal type and usage align. These corpus-based findings were validated experimentally. In a forced choice task, naive native speakers were exposed to definitions and prototypical examples of modal types or functions, then labeled a number of authentic corpus sentences accordingly. In the sorting task, naive native speakers sorted authentic corpus sentences into semantically coherent groups. We discuss the results of our empirical study as well as the issues involved in building usage-based accounts on traditional linguistic classifications