Regularities and variations in learner translations: A corpus-based study of conjunctive explicitation

This book presents a corpus-based investigation of cohesive explicitation in learner translations, using a multiple translation corpus (a parallel corpus in which several translations are available for each source text – all into the same target language) and aimed precisely at testing and evaluating the potential of this new corpus resource for assessing the “universalhood” of the notion of explicitation. The study builds on the extensive body of research on alleged Translation universals (or Laws of translational behavior) that has been at the heart of corpus-based Translation Studies in recent decades, and attempts a reconciliation with the opposite question of variation in translation, so far confined to a few studies comparing the style of literary translators. The study sets out to show that new insights into presumed common features of translated texts, such as explicitation, can be obtained precisely by analysing the interplay between variation and regularities in translators’ behavior. For this purpose, it argues that an innovative corpus resource may be used - that will be called ‘Multiple translation corpus’, i.e. a special type of parallel corpus in which several translations into the same target language are available for each source text, thus allowing the researcher to compare the performance of several translators translating the same source text. The methodology is tested by means of a case study focusing on the quantitative and qualitative analysis of the use of connectives in a corpus of translations produced by Italian students (from English and French into Italian), aimed at verifying the presence of explicitation at the level of cohesion-conjunction. The study shows that a) this new corpus resource proves particularly revealing, as it helps distinguishing explicitating shifts linked to target language norms/preferences from non-linguistically-motivated shifts; b) explicitation is not the most pervasive “universal” in learner translation, where phenomena of interference (and to a lesser extent normalization) also occur; and c) Multiple translation corpora can also represent a valuable support to the researcher’s (or the translation teacher’s) intuition about the appropriateness of alternative renditions.