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Translation and the Construction of Identity: Abstracts
Date: 12-14 August 2004
Venue: Sookmyung Women's University, Seoul, Korea
María Calzada-Pérez Universitat Jaume I, Castellón
de la Plana, Spain
European Union institutions depend greatly on translation both to encourage
the process of political and economic unification and to forge a European
identity that will boost such geopolitical integration. Indeed, translated
texts are so important in EU circles that they often acquire the same legal
status as their original counterparts. Within the European Parliament (EP)
in particular, translation results in formal shifts that may significantly
alter the pragma-semiotic (hence ideological) input of the source texts.
Such alterations have potential consequences for European citizens’ identity
(cf. Calzada-Pérez 2001). The proposed paper resorts to Corpus-based
Translation Studies (CTS) to perform a contrastive analysis between European
Parliament source and target texts. It brings together the results obtained
— both manually and electronically — from the analysis of a corpus of 104 EP
speeches delivered in English and Spanish before the European Parliament on
9th March 1993. Drawing mainly on Hatim and Mason (1990, 1997) and Critical
Discourse Analysis (CDA), Calzada-Pérez (1997) records a number of findings
(principally concerning transitivity) obtained through manual analysis. This
papers, in turn, aims to enrich those findings with the tools and
methodology provided by CTS. In order to do this, an electronic parallel
corpus (see Baker 1995, Kenny 2001) is created and significantly recurrent
patterns of linguistic behaviour (concerning mainly lexical creativity) are
discussed. The corpus undergoes a first descriptive stage where its
type-token ratio and its global lexical density are targeted with a view to
examining translational norms. A second, explicative stage tests the impact
of the descriptive findings upon the notions of EU ideology and identity.
Overall conclusions regarding manual and electronic findings and their
ideological repercussions are stated.
Calzada-Pérez, M. (1997) Transitivity in Translation. The Interdependence
of Texture and Context. A Contrastive Study of Original and Translated
Speeches in English and Spanish from the European Parliament,
Unpublished PhD Thesis, Edinburgh: Heriot-Watt University.
Calzada Pérez, M. (2001) ‘A
Three-level methodology for descriptive-explanatory Translation Studies’,
Target. 13(2): 203-241.
Hatim, B.
and I. Mason (1990) Discourse and the Translator, London and New
York: Longman.
Hatim and Mason (1997) The Translator as Communicator, London:
Routledge.
Baker, M. (1995) ‘Corpus in Translation Studies: An Overview and Some
Suggestions for Future Research’, Target 7(2): 223-243.
Kenny, D. (2001) Lexis and
Creativity in Translation. A Corpus-based Study, Manchester: St. Jerome.
Panel 3: Empowering Research in Crosscultural Communication - The Role of
International and Pan-National Institutions
Diverging Texts, Converging Identities. A CTS Analysis to Study European
Parliament Original and Translated Speeches
References
© IATIS 2003