The Routledge Handbook of Translation Studies and Linguistics


Book Description

The Routledge Handbook of Translation Studies and Linguistics explores the interrelationships between translation studies and linguistics in six sections of state-of-the-art chapters, written by leading specialists from around the world. The first part begins by addressing the relationships between translation studies and linguistics as major topics of study in themselves before focusing, in individual chapters, on the relationships between translation on the one hand and semantics, semiotics and the sound system of language on the other. Part II explores the nature of meaning and the ways in which meaning can be shared in text pairs that are related to each other as first-written texts and their translations, while Part III focuses on the relationships between translation and interpreting and the written and spoken word. Part IV considers the users of language and situations involving more than one language and Part V addresses technological tools that can assist language users. Finally, Part VI presents chapters on the links between areas of applied linguistics and translation and interpreting. With an introduction by the editor and an extensive bibliography, this handbook is an indispensable resource for advanced students of translation studies, interpreting studies and applied linguistics.




Text Linguistics and Translation


Book Description

The key purpose of this work is to examine the interrelationship between the field of text linguistics and translation with specific reference to computer translation. The question arises whether machine translation can ever be a practicable and reliable substitute for human translators. Based on this premise, this study assesses the effectiveness of machine translation software in its ability to translate the nuances of text linguistics from a source language to a target language. Following a literature review of text linguistics covering a number of textual analysis models and translation studies including machine translation, the primary research utilises a qualitative research methodology by means of text-based assessment. Three text samples are drawn from each of the following six text linguistic categories: register, pragmatics, semiotics, text type, genre and discourse. Using three leading Arabic translation software programmes the text samples are subjected to a comparative evaluation.




Text Analysis in Translation


Book Description

Text Analysis in Translation has become a classic in Translation Studies. Based on a functional approach to translation and endebted to pragmatic text linguistics, it suggests a model for translation-oriented source-text analysis applicable to all text types and genres independent of the language and culture pairs involved. Part 1 of the study presents the theoretical framework on which the model is based, and surveys the various concepts of translation theory and text linguistics. Part 2 describes the role and scope of source-text analysis in the translation process and explains why the model is relevant to translation. Part 3 presents a detailed study of the extratextual and intratextual factors and their interaction in the text, using numerous examples from all areas of professional translation. Part 4 discusses the applications of the model to translator training, placing particular emphasis on the selection of material for translation classes, grading the difficulty of translation tasks, and translation quality assessment. The book concludes with the practical analysis of a number of texts and their translations, taking into account various text types and several languages (German, English, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Dutch).




Communication Across Cultures


Book Description

While the literature on either contrastive linguistics or discourse analysis has grown immensely in the last twenty years, very little of it has ventured into fusing the two perspectives. Bearing in mind that doing discourse analysis without a contrastive base is as incomplete as doing contrastive analysis without a discourse base, the specific aim of this book is to argue that translation can add depth and breadth to both contrastive linguistics as well as to discourse analysis. Authentic data from both spoken and written English is used throughout to add clarity to theoretical insights gained from the study of discourse processing. Each aspect of the model proposed for the analysis of texts is related separately to a problem of language processing and in domains as varied as translation, interpreting, language teaching etc. The global objectives pursued in this volume are the training of future linguists and the sensitization of users of language in general to the realities of discourse.




Linguistics and the Language of Translation


Book Description

This text examines the relationship between the areas of translation, languages and linguistics. It includes sounds and rhythms, lexis, collocation and semantic prosody, texture, register, cohesion, coherence, implicature, speech and text acts, text and genre analysis, clausal thematicity and transitivity and the expression through language choices of ideological postions.




Text Linguistics and Translation


Book Description

Competent translators do not work by rule of thumb or recipe, they possess, like good cooks, a lot of principles, which guide their work. Libraries in our Arab world have few books on translation from Arabic into English and vice versa, that may instigate thinking of students and even translators. A book of this kind which is being brought out to give to the students of translation and translators another source. It may be found to have enriched the existing literature by putting most of the relevant material at various chapters and by providing to the needy students and translators; a compact book on the subject.




Text Linguistics


Book Description

Whether prose or poetry, how does a text come to mean what it does? A functional-semantic approach to text analysis, such as is illustrated in this book, offers a revealing look at the resources of language at work in the creation of meaning, and a unique perspective on the text as object of study. Believing the best way to learn about text linguistics is through the analysis of full texts, the author includes analyses of texts, both spoken and written, drawn from a variety of genres, including examples of religious and political discourse. In the first section, the author provides an overview suitable to those who are new to the theory and methodology of Systemic Functional Grammar and Rhetorical Structure Theory. Building on this foundation, section two presents the findings from several case studies in text analysis, demonstrating how to conduct indepth functional-semantic analysis of selected texts. This second section will benefit both beginners and those who have already had some background in the study of linguistics. Text Linguistics is the ideal choice for those who are learning about text linguistics, and functional approaches to language study.




New perspectives on cohesion and coherence


Book Description

The contributions to this volume investigate relations of cohesion and coherence as well as instantiations of discourse phenomena and their interaction with information structure in multilingual contexts. Some contributions concentrate on procedures to analyze cohesion and coherence from a corpus-linguistic perspective. Others have a particular focus on textual cohesion in parallel corpora that include both originals and translated texts. Additionally, the papers in the volume discuss the nature of cohesion and coherence with implications for human and machine translation. The contributors are experts on discourse phenomena and textuality who address these issues from an empirical perspective. The chapters in this volume are grounded in the latest research making this book useful to both experts of discourse studies and computational linguistics, as well as advanced students with an interest in these disciplines. We hope that this volume will serve as a catalyst to other researchers and will facilitate further advances in the development of cost-effective annotation procedures, the application of statistical techniques for the analysis of linguistic phenomena and the elaboration of new methods for data interpretation in multilingual corpus linguistics and machine translation.




The Study of Language and Translation


Book Description

The volume contains a selection of papers from the congress on the topic of 'The Study of Language and Translation', held in Ghent in January 2006. Its theme is the interface between Linguistics and Translation Studies. The volume hosts contributions from leading scholars in the field such as Mona Baker, Andrew Chesterman, Christiane Nord, and others. Some articles are theoretical but the majority relies on empirical data. Many of those are in some way or another tributary to the corpus approach, with translation universals as a recurring theme. Various methodologies are suggested for the investigation of similarities, metacommunication, borrowings, collocations, and other topics. The differences between translations and their source texts and those between translated and non-translated texts are explored in various ways. The findings yield hypotheses about the mechanisms in the process of translation and the cognitive viewpoint is never far away. As a whole, the volume presents the richness of the field of descriptive Translation Studies and the complexities involved in its linguistic approach.




Cross-Linguistic Variation in System and Text


Book Description

The intuition that translations are somehow different from texts that are not translations has been around for many years, but most of the common linguistic frameworks are not comprehensive enough to account for the wealth and complexity of linguistic phenomena that make a translation a special kind of text. The present book provides a novel methodology for investigating the specific linguistic properties of translations. As this methodology is both corpus-based and driven by a functional theory of language, it is powerful enough to account for the multi-dimensional nature of cross-linguistic variation in translations and cross-lingually comparable texts.