Search

This article deals with two main topics of interest for Translation Studies: the exploitation of multilingual comparable corpora and the analysis of the relationship between a text category and its linguistic manifestation in specialized texts. In the first part of this study, we make a review of some theoretical issues related to the use of specialized corpora in translation practice. The aim in this part is not only to satisfy punctual terminological needs, but also to explore new possibilities, like those proposed by Functional Stylistics for the study of conventionalisms in specialized texts. In the second part, we describe some of the steps involved in the process of compilation and exploitation of a particular specialized corpus, that of neuromuscular diseases in pediatrics. We thereby study corpus characteristics and analysis, automatic extraction of definitional contexts, and analysis of the thematic chains and its textual markers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the English impersonal appearance construction (it seems/appears) and its relationship with the propositions over which it scopes. Attention focuses on four aspects: the presence/absence of explicit personalization via circumstantial element to me; the use of conjunctive, comparative or elided binder; the modal/temporal deicticity of the framed proposition; and the instantiation of these features across written and spoken modes of communication. These features are considered on account of prior studies assigning semantic correlates to their occurrence on the basis of qualitative analysis. The study applies log-linear analysis, a statistical technique that allows exploration of associations between two or more categorical variables, to test the degree of association between the four aspects mentioned. Three significant effects are included in the final model: a three-way interaction between mode of communication, binder choice and personalization, and two two-way associations between personalization and framed clause deicticity, and between binder choice and framed clause deicticity. The identified associations are discussed in the light of relevant literature and qualitative findings. The paper ends with concluding remarks and critical reflections on the use of log-linear analysis for the study of linguistic variation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, opera translation and surtitling has become a field of growing popularity in translation studies. While current research often revolves around opera in the western countries or opera translation for the stage, this paper aims to explore the translation of Beijing Opera in films. The discussion will draw upon literature on opera translation and surtitles while examining Beijing Opera. With reference to Raise the Red Lantern (1991), directed by Zhang Yimou, an internationally acclaimed filmmaker, this paper will focus on the rendition of Beijing Opera and propose subtitles for an opera sequence in the film. The major finding is that it is possible to convey the general meaning of the lyrics of Beijing Opera through simplification, i.e. culturally-bound references could be simplified for better understanding. This is an addition to the existing research on translation from other languages into English and will have implications for future practices in this domain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to propose a new concept, discursive interpersonality, as a flexibilized model of interpersonal metadiscourse (IM). Departing from the proven validity of IM (Hyland, 2005a, 2005b) as a framework to analyse interpersonal relations between writers/speakers and readers/listeners, our argumentation is grounded on our research results, stemming from the study of different academic and professional genres. Since interpersonal metadiscourse is conditioned by contextual variables, such as genre, discipline, language and corpus, as an array of authors suggest (Dahl, 2004; Sala, 2006; Yakhontova, 2006; Giannoni, 2007; Mapelli, 2008; Crismore & Abdollazadeh, 2010; Gotti, 2010; Lorés-Sanz, 2011a; Ivorra Pérez, 2015, 2016; Suau-Jiménez, 2016; Mattiello, 2018; Turiman et al., 2018; Herrando-Rodrigo, 2019), IM would need to be redefined or readapted, including new markers, new lexico-grammatical realizations. As a result and very importantly, propositionality should be considered a theoretical central feature that contributes to interpersonal interactions but that traditional approaches of IM do not accept as such. So, a new, more encompassing concept needs to be coined that accounts for all these essential aspects. Assuming how interpersonal metadiscourse has been defined conventionally (Mauranen, 1993a, 1993b; Hyland, 2005a, 2017), we propose two integrative concepts: discursive turn (Jaworski & Pritchard, 2005), not in its philosophical sense but in one that sees discourse as an identity axis or departure point for analysis, and interpersonality (Lorés-Sanz et al., 2010), considered as an umbrella term broader than IM. Discursive interpersonality might thus open more satisfactory paths for further research in a variety of genres, domains and languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to analyse the said promotional touristic texts as units of meaning that operate within the tourism discourse. Based on the concept of mythological signifier proposed by Febas (1978) in the framework of the touristic communication theory, and considering the principles of the translotological functionalism, three components can be distinguished in this type of texts concerning their "promotional" and "touristic" denominations: the spatial component, the temporal component and the prospective component. The theoretical and argumentative development of these components are accompanied by examples from a trilingual textual corpus (Spanish, French, English) extracted from the promotional material of the Instituto de Turismo de España - TURESPAÑA (the Spanish Tourism Institute). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Museum texts play a critical role in the discourse that accompanies any given artifact, exhibition or museum. In the case of museum text translation, some relevant contributions have appeared in recent years; however, some scholars suggest that this is a field of study that still needs to be further developed. This paper focuses on several aspects of museum text translation based on a descriptive analysis of records found on websites from 26 museums in New York City. By analyzing the corpus, which has been essentially compiled in two periods (2016 and 2020), we notice a word increase of 40% within this four-year period. As for the types of texts that are more frequent in the corpus, educational resources are at the top of the list, followed by press releases and texts informing about parallel activities. There is also a tendency for translating texts related to temporary exhibitions, as compared to texts on the museums' collections, which are scarce in the corpus. Lastly, in the light of the generalized museum closure in mid-March 2020 due to the COVID-19 outbreak, it is noticed that just a few of the museums' websites inform visitors of the closure by using the Spanish language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reciprocity in contemporary English is normally expressed by means of the compound pronouns each other and one another, both constructions used interchangeably and without any apparent difference in meaning, even though various factors have been proposed to account for the choice between the two alternatives. Among them, style stands out as the most convincing argument postulating the use of each other and one another in informal and formal contexts, respectively. In corpus-oriented grammars, their usage is explained in terms of register variation, each other being by far the most common form in all contexts while one another becomes relatively common in fiction and academic prose (Biber et al., 1999: 346-347). From a historical viewpoint, each other stems from those Old English constructions in which the quantifier ælc occurs with the alterity word oþer in neighbouring positions, while one another is a Late Middle English development of (the) one + (the) (an)other, where the first element is also the grammatical subject and the second the object (Haas, 2010: 63-68). Since then, both reciprocals have competed for more than five centuries for the expression of reciprocity in English and, interestingly enough, the dilemma is still unresolved, contradicting the general assumption that the competition between forms whose meaning is compatible is usually resolved either by the loss of one of them or by the adoption of a different (Kahlas-Tarkka, 2004: 132). The Early Modern English period becomes a crucial period in the history of reciprocals witnessing the transition from the discontinuous forms each the other and one the other to the fossilized constructions each other and one another. In the light of this, the present paper pursues the following objectives: a) to trace the origin, grammaticalization and univerbation of each other and one another within their own paradigm in Early Modern English, and b) to analyse the use and distribution of these reciprocals to determine the date and the circumstances that contributed to the adoption of each other over one another for the expression of reciprocity in the history of English. The source of evidence comes from the Early English Books Online Corpus (for the period 1473-1700) and the Old Bailey Corpus (for the period 1674-1913). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a non-normative phenomenon almost unknown in Spanish, the "pluralization" of adverbs in -mente (lugares realmentes sorprendentes 'places really surprising'), which is not found in the main grammars of this language. From the data of Corpus del español we propose to make known this phenomenon, to show in which countries it is documented and with what frequency. Later, we analyze which adverbs in -mente show this final -s in current Spanish and in what syntactic contexts are given. In particular, we show that the kind of adverbs that are involved in this phenomenon are degree, modality, and focusing adverbs, mainly when they modify adjectives or sentences. Finally, we propose an explanation of the presence of this final -s based on two different processes that the Spanish language undergoes in the grammatical category of adverbs: adverbial agreement, which so far has been described for quantifier adverbs, and adverb "false" pluralization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this research is to determine and analyse the engagement markers used in the comments on the news published in the online papers El País (Spain) and Emol (Chile). The comments were selected from two different contexts: politics and sports. In this study we consider engagement markers as part of interactional metadiscourse, that is, the elements that involve readers to call their attention or to include them as participants of discourse (Hyland, 2005a). In this research, a corpus of 2,400 comments were compiled and tagged manually and with UAM Corpus Tool. The purpose of the analysis was to identify the metadiscoursal strategies used as engagement markers. The results showed that the writers that comment news in Emol and in El País used a similar amount of engagement markers; on the other hand, significative variation was not identified in the use of engagement markers in comments on politics and sports, although these markers were more frequently found in political comments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Words meanings and their use in the language are not fixed in time. This is the case of the word humor, whose current meaning is new in Spanish, as it is attested in dictionaries. Lexicographic discourse can reveal enough data about the history of words. Therefore, the aim of this research is to find out the concept of humor that appears from the first papers in the Spanish lexicography, from the late fifteenth century to the early eighteenth century. Taking Covarrubias's dictionary (1611) as a turning point, a corpus of dictionaries has been compiled to do research on how the subject of humor was treated by the selection of voices related to it. The results are sufficiently clear in respect to the prudence with which this subject was conceived, as well as to its pragmatically marked use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For carrying out the research "Recurrent prosodic patterns in Chile the speech acts of Chile public speech: phonophonological description", it was necessary to build a corpus showing manifestations of such acts in different communicative situations. In this paper we, firstly, describe the procedures undertaken to build the corpus; secondly, those criteria underlying the sample selection are defined and, finally the labelling procedures are described. The objective of this paper is, then, to account for the process of corpus collection and to propose a holistic labelling that duly contains for all the components that distinctly identify each of the communicative instances that make up our corpus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing need for a linguistic and cultural1 mediation between public service providers and users who do not have sufficient command of the official language of the public authorities has contributed to the development of a discipline within Translation Studies--Public Service Interpreting and Translation Studies (PSIT)--, covering different areas such a healthcare or administrative settings. It seems that documentation is essential at these stages so that the translator/interpreter can acquire the appropriate skills and knowledge to be able to produce the target text. This paper describes how we have used a corpus methodology as an additional lexicographical and documentation resource for the translation of healthcare texts in the PSIT classroom. We show the corpus compilation process our postgraduate students followed and how they worked with a well-known concordance program in order to analyze their corpus as a source of conceptual, terminological and phraseological information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An analysis of the non-deictic second person singular uses in Chilean Spanish is presented in this paper. The dataset is made of semi-spontaneous speech, specifically, sociolinguistic inter-views, from which an exploratory corpus was extracted. In this context, the main goal of the research is to analyse the non-deictic 2nd person singular uses according to stylistic aspects through a new proposal of discourse-pragmatic categories which are related with linguistic and extralinguistic variables. Specifically, four categories are distinguished: a) generalization, b) focused generalization, c) inclusive defocalization and d) self-disguising. This classification is then correlated with the factors of forms of address and sex. Results regarding the sociolinguistic and morphosyntactic variables demonstrate that men present higher frequencies of use of the non-deictic strategies, specifically with voseo verb forms, while women tend to employ this device with tuteo. As for the categories, non-deictic usage is especially high through generalization and focused generalization, as strategies associated with a potential effect of empathy towards the interlocutor, especially in those cases where voseo is employed. In this sense, each of the categories proposed represents a specific discourse-pragmatic strategy at a stylistic variation level, which is regarded not only by the degree of formality, but also as a linguistic choice within the speakers' repertoire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the use of Vedic svá- in the hymns of the Ṛgveda and the Atharvaveda. The aim is to show that one of its main values, together with possession, is intensification. The supporting arguments for this statement are: (a) its high frequency in discursively prominent positions of the stanza, (b) its presence in non-reflexive and non-possessive clauses, (c) its special referentiality in cases of substantivization, (d) the kind of non-reflexive nominal compounds that allows and (e) its presence in pseudo-relative clauses. This work, framed on a typological-functional theoretical approach, helps us to understand comprehensively how the diverse uses of this word are connected along the analysed corpus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics, in the Cardiff model (Fawcett, 2000, 2008, 2011, forthcoming a, forthcoming b), we explore the transitivity system of communication processes in the economic media discourse in Spanish. In the Cardiff Grammar, verbal processes are conceived as a subset of mental processes of cognition and they have a configuration of three participant roles: Agent + Affected- Cognizant + Phenomenon. The participant role Agent gives information or knowledge to an Affected who, thereafter, becomes Cognizant, and so comes to know of some Phenomenon. It is assumed that these three roles are inherent in this process type, i.e., they are required at the level of meaning, even if they are covert and sometimes unrealized at the level of form (Fawcett, in preparation a, in preparation b). In this paper, we analyze a subset (50 texts) of a corpus called DIDIECO (Economic Media Discourse), built according to the principles of Corpus Linguistics (Biber, 1993; McEnery & Wilson, 2001; Parodi, 2010). In order to annotate the corpus, syntactic and semantic analysis were made, applying verification tests (Fawcett, 2011) for participants roles. Our main purposes are: (i) distinguish criteria to identify members of the class “communication process”; (ii) determine the frequency of instantiation of each verb in this kind of discourse; (iii) extend in delicacy the system network proposed by Fawcett, based on the concept of “lexis as most delicate grammar” (Halliday, 1961), and (iv) consider the diversity of verbs that realize communication processes in the light of the discourse in which they are inserted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the methodological aspects of the construction of terminological subontologies within the architecture of FunGramKB. The main hypothesis is that the multilevel model of the Nuclear Ontology in FunGramKB (metaconceptual level, basic level and terminal level) can be connected to a terminological subontology in order to minimize redundancy and maximize information knowledge. One of the features of this subontology is, firstly, its implementation for the creation of a specialized module in the Ontology and, secondly, its focus on deep semantics, in contrast with the vast majority of terminological ontologies, which are based on surface semantics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Framed within the world of Artificial Intelligence, and more precisely within the project FunGramKB, i.e. a user-friendly environment for the semiautomatic construction of a multipurpose lexico-conceptual knowledge base for Natural Language Processing systems, the aim of this paper is two-fold. Firstly, we shall provide a necessarily non-exhaustive theoretical discussion of FunGramKB in which we will introduce the main elements that make up its Ontology (i.e. Thematic Frames, Meaning Postulates, different types of concepts, etc.). Secondly, we will describe the meticulous process carried out by knowledge engineers when populating this conceptually-driven Ontology. In doing so, we shall examine various examples belonging to the domain of 'change' or #TRANSFORMATION (in the COREL notation), in an attempt to show how conceptual knowledge can be modeled in for Artificial Intelligence purposes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]