Terminological Variation in Source Texts and Translations: A Pilot Study

• Autores: Sabela Fernández Silva, Koen Kerremans
• Localización: Meta: Journal des traducteurs = translators' journal, ISSN 0026-0452, Vol. 56, Nº. 2, 2011 (Ejemplar dedicado a: Les corpus et la recherche en terminologie et en traductologie / Corpora and Research in Terminology and Translation Studies), págs. 318-335
• Idioma: inglés
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• Dialnet Métricas: 4 Citas
• Resumen

  • In this article, it is assumed that the choice of terminological variants in specialized source texts is sometimes cognitively motivated and that this motivation is reflected in the choice of equivalents in the target texts. On the basis of a pilot study, we will present a method for comparing the cognitively motivated terminological variants in source texts and their translations. The corpus in the pilot study is composed of three Galician source texts and their English translations. The texts are scientific articles addressing the economic effects of environmental disasters on fisheries. A quantitative study was first carried out in which the number of unique terms in each source text was compared to the number of unique translations of these terms. Next, each unique combination of a source term and its translation equivalent was subjected to a qualitative analysis. A value was manually assigned in order to qualify the "cognitive distance" between the source term and its translation. Based on these values and the frequency of the translation pair in each bitext, we computed the "interlingual variation index" (IVI). Differences in results between the bitexts are linked to extra-linguistic factors related to the translation processes.

    
    
    Plan de l'article
    
    1. Introduction
    2. Research framework
    2.1. Terminological variation in specialized translation
    2.2. Cognitive motivations for terminological variation
    3. Methodology
    3.1. Corpus compilation
    3.2 Identification of source language terms
    3.3 Identification of translation equivalents
    3.4 Analysis of teminological variation
    4. Results
    4.1 Terminological variation in the source texts
    4.2 Terminological variation in source texts and translations
    4.3. Analysis of the cognitive distance and interlingual variation index
    5. Discussion
    6. Conclusion