Love Thy Neighbour: Will Parallel Corpora Endear Linguists Totranslators?
Love Thy Neighbour: Will Parallel Corpora Endear Linguists Totranslators?
Love Thy Neighbour: Will Parallel Corpora Endear Linguists Totranslators?
Meta
Journal des traducteurs
Translators' Journal
Publisher(s)
Les Presses de l'Université de Montréal
ISSN
0026-0452 (print)
1492-1421 (digital)
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Résumé
Cet article analyse les avantages et les inconvénients de l'approche basée sur les corpus
parallèles, particulièrement lorsqu'il s'agit de répondre à des questions soulevées par les études
traductologiques.
Abstract
This paper analyses the advantages and difficulties that the study of parallel corpora pre-
sents when attempting to answer questions arising specifically from within translation studies.
iv) The method can be exploited for language learning/teaching purposes and for
translator training.
v) The study of parallel text corpora can promote "studies of the linguistic phe-
nomena involved in the process of transferring information, ideas, concepts from
one language to another" (Marinai, Peters and Picchi 1991: 63-64, 1992: 222).
There is little cause to doubt the first four of these claims. The fifth claim raises a
host of questions concerning the stability of concepts under variation in language, even
if we replace the notoriously problematic transfer metaphor (see Reddy 1979) with the
notion of realisation. These questions are fundamental in more traditional comparative
linguistics too; however, I shall not discuss them here, although mention will be made of
the types of corpus research likely to promote the goals expressed in claim (v) in sections
3 and 4 below.
Now, it would appear that large, machine readable corpora of pairs of real life
Source and Target Texts might also be able to provide reassurance about several specific
worries to which the introspective method of comparative linguistics gives rise.
The unease at using one or a few informants' introspection about isolated equiva-
lence relationships between isolated terms, constructions or sentences might fade in the
face of the great masses of real, commissioned translations of real, socially functional
texts.
The worry about variability might be calmed because the mass of data enables vari-
ability to be expressed in probabilistic terms.
The worry about context-sensitivity might disappear because the mass of data is
embedded in a mass of co-text and has been produced in a mass of context. The corpus
can show the statistical likelihood that a particular equivalence relationship will obtain,
given specifiable co-textual and sometimes even contextual factors. It is also possible to
take account of norm differences across genres.
Looking at real translations should also be a way of adding an important dimen-
sion to comparative/contrastive linguistics. Instead of focusing on the relationships
between the languages as static systems, it should be possible to consider the relation-
ships between the languages in use, since in pairs of Source and Target Texts the lan-
guages are indisputably being used to some purpose.
Will, then, the use of such corpora endear comparative linguists to translation
scholars? I for one would greatly welcome a warming of relations. However, I hope, at
the same time, that we are not about to experience a period of head-over-heels infatua-
tion, and while I believe the claims for the method listed at the beginning of this section,
I would like to spend some time considering the potential difficulties involved in draw-
ing on parallel corpora in research intended to be relevant to translation studies.
The provision of an English gloss for this text fragment presents no difficulties,
and it would be reasonable to expect that only minimal changes would be needed to
adjust the gloss to proper English use-conventions. The sentence may seem a bit pecu-
liar insofar as biological relationships (being brothers, being born) are set up between
inanimates (tin soldiers, tin spoons), but there is no reason to suppose that this need
interfere with translation. However, as is so often the case, reality, in the form of a
selection of published translations of this text, holds a few surprises (I highlight the
terms which function as translational equivalents of brødre and of født):
1. BROTHERS all of them, because they were MADE
2. all BROTHERS, because they had all been BORN
3. all BROTHERS, for all had been MADE
5. all BROTHERS, because they had all COME
7. all BROTHERS because they had been MADE
8. all BROTHERS, for they all CAME
9. BROTHERS, for they had all SPRUNG
10. all BROTHERS because they were MADE
Here, født seems to pair up with a number of terms which introspection might not
have provided as translation equivalents: "made," "come" and "sprung." Nor is any
bilingual dictionary likely to list any of these as equivalents for født.
As this tiny corpus shows, for each individual instance in a particular context,
translators' preferences can differ just as much as they might in cases of context-free
introspection. In fact, in this case they probably differ more; I suspect that most people
would straightforwardly produce "born" if they were asked to produce an English equiv-
alent for født. Yet only one of the translators produces this equivalent. The rest choose
either "made," "come" or "sprung."
Let us suppose that one of these translations had been selected for inclusion in a
corpus. I assume that most instances of født in the rest of such a corpus would be trans-
lated as "born." If so, then translation (2), if it happened to be the one selected for
inclusion in the corpus, would draw very little attention to itself in this place in the text.
In the case of any one of the other translations, however, the analyst might notice
the oddity. Say the oddity was noticed and found sufficiently exciting to merit investiga-
tion. A search of the immediate context for the pair will show the semantic anomaly
which pertains to both brødre ("brothers") and født ("born") in the context of inani-
mates. Since only født, and not Brødre receives an unexpected equivalent (from the all-
things-being-equal point of view), a tentative conclusion might well be that in English
the term "born" lends itself less happily to figurative uses than the term "brothers." This
conclusion might then be tested by examining a monolingual English corpus which, I
assume, would confirm it, since it is exactly the conclusion which the corpus based
COBUILD dictionary seems to have arrived at.
COBUILD has 6 headings for brother. One heading gives the literal, biological
meaning, and 5 give figurative meanings. In the case of born there are 12 headings. 10
are literal-biological, and 2 figurative ("When an idea, organization etc. is born, it
comes into existence;" "If something is born of a particular activity or emotion, it exists
as a result of it").
It is interesting that the majority of the translators in my sample seem to have
reacted with great sensitivity to the norm of use for this term in English which the
COBUILD dictionary reflects. If one of this majority was included in the corpus, the
analyst might suggest that the translated norms of use for the English term "born" over-
rode any preconceived equivalence relationship between født and "born." If, on the
WILL PARALLEL CORPORA ENDEAR LINGUISTS TO TRANSLATORS? 5
other hand, translation (2) was to be included, the preconceived relationship would
obtain, and there would be no cause to investigate the pairing in this place at all.
These scenarios are, of course, imagined. However, there seems to be some justi-
fication for my flights of fancy in Marinai, Peters and Picchi's description of their own
procedure (1991: 65):
The Parallel Text Retrieval System operates in two stages. In the first [...] as many links as
possible are established between translation equivalents in the two texts [...]; in the second,
the query system uses the links in order to construct, in real time, parallel contexts for any
form or occurrence of forms contained in the texts.
The links that are initially established rely on preconceived notions of translation
equivalences between pairs of terms or expressions; the equivalence-pairs født —
"made/sprung/come" would be most unlikely to be among these preconceptions. How-
ever, it might be discovered in a search focused for example on the brødre — "brothers"
pair, since the context provided for this pair would probably be large enough to reveal
the født — "made/come/sprung" pairing too. As Marinai, Peters and Picchi say (1991:
70):
A particular advantage of using the system is that, as the parallel contexts are constructed
for any word present in the Corpus (and not only for those forms for which a translation
equivalent link has been created), real-world translations for words or expressions which
are not to be found in any dictionary can be accessed and recorded.
It follows that a great deal hinges on the extent of the context displayed, and
Marinai, Peters and Picchi's examples revolve around one or two sentences. Of course,
it is possible to search as large a context as one wishes, but in practice one or two sen-
tences is the maximum context computers are asked to search, and it is very common
to present the results of the search in concordance lines containing between five and
ten words either side of the nodes. The reasons for this restriction of the search and pre-
sentation fields are practical: a search using wider contexts would slow the process
down so considerably that the advantage of quantity would be lost. Chomsky (1957: 15-
17) has remarked in this connection that the method "is incapable of modeling certain
syntactic constraints such as agreement over long distances" (Church and Gale 1991:
40). It seems to me likely that similar difficulties might arise in cases where the target is
not so much a syntactic phenomenon as a semantic one, including the realisation of
information, ideas, and concepts.
In the case of the født — "made/come/sprung" pair, of course, it looks as if the
context will be perfectly adequate. The semantic anomaly in terms of which the over-
riding of the straightforward equivalence relationship is to be explained will be obvious,
because Tinske ("tin spoon") is only the fourth word after født ("born"). The problem is
that the context would not be large enough if an analyst wanted to test whether this
anomaly not only explains but justifies the choice.
And justification might, in fact, be called for in the case of my little example,
because a very strong argument might be made to the effect that the minority transla-
tion (2) is preferable to the majority's alternatives, given the nature of the text, and
given that the original, I believe, contravenes a norm for Danish which is equivalent to
the norm for English. We are dealing with a Source Text in which the language that is
being used to talk about the tin soldier constantly teases the reader with the possibility
that the tin soldier has certain human emotions, cognitive abilities and characteristics
— such as having been born, for example. It could be argued, therefore, that there is
reason in this case to override a Target Language norm. It is not my intention to engage
in that debate; I simply want to make the point that no such debate would be aided by
6 Meta, XLIII, 4, 1998
evidence from a parallel corpus constructed and searched according to currently pre-
dominant conventions. But translators often have to justify the choices they make when
they are translating literary texts, which are certainly not the only text type in which the
selection of specific linguistic items can be highly significant.
We may suspect, then, that the method by which parallel corpora are typically
constructed and searched may very easily render them incapable of providing some of
the types of information which would be helpful to translators; and probably the kind of
information which would be required to show the varied realisations of concepts in dif-
ferent languages. More specifically, parallel corpora seem to have the potential to fail
translators in two ways (at least):
i) Like metaphors (Lakoff and Johnson 1980), parallel corpora highlight some
phenomena while hiding others, and the distribution of phenomena between the
hidden and highlighted categories may not be the one most helpful to translators.
ii) Although parallel corpora provide evidence of how languages relate to each
other in use, we still only get one individual's introspection on each individual in-
stance contained in the corpus. But, as Snell-Hornby remarks (see section 1
above) and as my small corpus confirms, translators' opinions may differ on indi-
vidual instances in individual contexts. We may suspect that where they differ
most is where investigation might prove particularly fruitful. As parallel corpora
are constructed at the moment, these cases would not come to light.
To sum up, then, the problems pertaining to the use of parallel corpora in the fur-
therance of translation studies include: first, the metaphor-like problem of highlighting
and hiding. Secondly, the problem that a parallel corpus still only provides, for each
instance, the result of one individual's introspection, albeit contextually and cotextu-
ally informed. Thirdly, the problem that in order to be able to provide any kinds of
explanation of the data provided by the corpus, rather than mere statistics, analysts
really need substantially more context than computers tend to search and display. Biber
and Finegan (1991: 209) remark on the propensity of corpus linguists to treat their data
as a collection of individual sentences, ignoring the potential offered by the corpora for
studying features of text. It looks as if this tendency is in danger of being transferred
wholesale to parallel text studies.
4. A WAY AHEAD?
Stig Johansson (1991: 305-6) suggests that in spite of the undoubted advantages
of large corpora, there is still something to be said "for smaller, carefully constructed
sample corpora which can be analysed exhaustively in a variety of ways." I believe that
one very fruitful way forward for corpus linguistics would be to begin to supplement the
vast, quantitatively oriented parallel corpus studies with smaller corpora consisting of
source texts and as many translations of each source text as possible. The problem, of
course, would be that there are not many genres which include texts that have had sev-
eral translations made of them, so that anyone wishing to use this methodology would
probably be forced either to rely on literary texts or to commission the translations. I
personally think that literary stylistics is not so far removed from non-literary stylistics
that the use of literary texts would be a particular disadvantage, though it might be diffi-
cult to find the texts in machine-readable form. Another difficulty is that literary texts
which have been translated many times tend to be non-contemporary. However, it
seems clear that text analysis and interpretation must begin to play a part in studies of
parallel corpora, if we are to get anywhere near to being able to say anything about how
WILL PARALLEL CORPORA ENDEAR LINGUISTS TO TRANSLATORS? 7
Note
1. By "parallel corpus" I mean a corpus containing ST-TT pairs.
Source for Andersen's original text
H.C. Andersens Eventyr: Kritisk udgivet efter de originale eventyrhæfter med varianter ved Erik Dal og kom-
mentar ved Erling Nielsen. I:1835-42. 1963. II:1843-55. 1964. III: 1856-65. 1965. IV:1861-66. 1966. Copen-
hagen: Hans Reitzels Forlag.
Sources for the translations
1) Hans Christian Andersen: Fairy Tales. Translated by Marie-Louise Peulevé. Odense: Skandinavisk
Bogforlag. No Date (but pre-1968).
2) Hans Andersen's Fairy Tales: A Selection. Translated from the Danish by L.W. Kingsland. London:
Oxford University Press. 1959.
3) Hans Christian Andersen: Fairy Tales. Translator not named. London etc.: Hamlyn. 1959.
4) Tales from Hans Andersen, Translated by Stephen Corrin, 1978, London: Guild Publishing. 1989.
5) Hans Andersen: His Classic Fairy Tales. Translation Copyright Erik Haugaard 1976. London: Lynx.
1988.
6) Hans Christian Andersen: Eighty Fairy Tales. Translated by R.P. Keigwin. Odense: Skandinavisk Bog-
forlag. 1976. Introduction by Elias Bredsdorff. New York: Pantheon Books. 1982.
7) Hans Christian Andersen: Fairy Tales. Translated by Reginald Spink. London: Everyman's Library.
1960.
8) Hans Christian Andersen: Stories and Fairy Tales. Selected, translated and illustrated by Erik Blegvad.
London: Heinemann. 1993.
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