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Journal of Translation Translation Studies 9(1) (2006), 43–58 43–58
Corpus-based Translation Studies: A Quantitative or Qualitative Development? Dorothy Kenny
Abstract
Baker’s (1993) earliest paper on the potential of corpus-based translation studies argued that corpora would provide an empirical basis for descriptive translation studies. Since then corpora have been used principally in the investigation of “universal” (or, more tentatively, “general”) features of translation, on the one hand, and in the study of the specific styles of individual translators, on the other. A number of extensive case studies have now been conducted, and advances in corpusbased methodologies have been made, but it is not altogether clear what corpora have added to our understanding of basic theoretical constructs in translation studies. Has the quantitative shift led to a qualitative shift, as Tognini-Bonelli (1996) has argued in the case of linguistics in general? In this paper I aim to investigate whether or not our understanding of aspects of our object of enquiry has shifted in any way after a decade of using corpora in translation studies. Taking such concepts as the unit of translation, equivalence, and the translator’s voice as examples, I ask whether exposure to more data, and new ways of looking at this data, have led us to rethink or refine any of these concepts.
1. Int ntrrodu oduct ctiion
In her agenda-setting 1993 paper on corpus linguistics and translation studies, Mona Baker argued that access to corpora — large electronic collections of texts — stood to change the face of translation studies. Given that translation studies had already begun to shed its preoccupation with © Department of Translation, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, 2006. Published by The Chinese University Press, ISSN 1027-7978.
Journal of Translation Translation Studies Studies 9(1) (2006)
source texts and prescriptive notions of equivalence, and had instead begun to focus on real translated texts in their host contexts — notably under the influence of Even-Zohar’s (1979) polysystem theory and Toury’s (1980, 1995) descriptive translation studies — Baker argued that the time was ripe for corpora to be pressed into service in translation studies. Large corpora of translated and original texts would help translation theorists further define and account for their object of inquiry, by providing them “with a unique opportunity to observe the object of their study and to explore what it is that makes it different from other objects of study, such as language in general or indeed any other kind of cultural interaction” and by allowing them “to explore, on a larger scale than was ever possible before, the principles that govern translational behaviour and the constraints under which it operates” (Baker 1993: 235). Corpora, it was hoped, could help translation studies make the leap from “prescriptive to descriptive statements, from methodologising to proper theorising, and from individual and fragmented pieces of research to powerful generalisations” (ibid.: 248). It is easy to understand Baker’s sense of anticipation, when one considers how corpora had already begun to revolutionise other disciplines, including lexicography and linguistics. The first corpus-based dictionary of English had been published in 1987 (Sinclair 1987), and before long, corpora had begun to dominate the area. Indeed ˆ dictionaries are nowadays compiled almost exclusively using corpora (Cermák 2003: 18). In linguistics, despite early scepticism about the usefulness of corpora, the shift to real language data was well underway by the early 1990s, so much so that corpus linguists delighted in the fact that corpora were becoming mainstream (Svartvik 1996). And before long it was considered very poor form not no t to invoke corpus data to back up linguistic generalisations (see, for example, Aitchison 2005: 18). 1 Corpora had also come to dominate computational linguistics (see unpublished work by Julia Hirschberg cited in Sampson 2005), with automatic induction from corpora now seen as the only viable way to build computational grammars, overcome the knowledge-acquisition bottleneck in machine translation, etc. In lexicography and the branch of linguistics that deals with lexicogrammar, which considers the interaction between words and the grammatical structures they typically occur in (a concern not just in corpus linguistics, but also in other areas of theoretical and computational linguistics — see Pustejovsky 1995: 5), the corpus revolution did not 44
Corpus-based Translation Translation Studies: A Quantitative or Qualitative Development?
merely mean that linguists now looked to large, easily searchable and independent collections of data to validate their claims about language. Rather, the argument goes, the sheer quantity of data available led to a qualitative shift, with corpus evidence being used to question the assumption that lexis could be separated from grammar, or form from meaning, or even instance from system. Concordance lines, the stock-intrade of the corpus linguist, were used to illustrate the fact that the vertical patterns in language become visible when we see enough of the horizontal; and Saussure’s (1916) paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations are actually two ways of seeing the same data. Put Pu t the other way round, “the cumulative cumulativ e effect of repeated instances is taken to reflect the semiotic system” (Tognini-Bonelli 1996: 71). Sinclair’s (1996) treatment of syntagmatic relations ultimately led him to claim that “so strong are the cooccurrence tendencies of words, word classes, meanings and attitudes that we must widen our horizons and expect the units of meaning to be much more extensive and varied than is seen in a single word” (Sinclair 1996: 94). Michael Stubbs (2001, 2002), in particular, then went on to use corpus evidence in an attempt to quantify the extent to which common lexemes in English partake in such extended units of meaning. Corpus evidence has thus been adduced to make profound claims about the object of inquiry in linguistics, and the units of analysis that could be applied to real language data, and the centrality of corpora to contemporary lexicography, Natural Language Processing and European linguistics at least (see Teubert 2001: 125) is undeniable. After a decade of using corpora in translation studies, it seems fitting to ask what contribution they have made to the discipline in general. Have they become indispensable? Has the “corpus linguistic turn in translation studies” (Laviosa 2004: 9) been restricted to those working within the area specifically known as corpus-based translation studies, or are its ramifications felt across the whole discipline? Have corpora helped us to define our object of inquiry and explain any of its specificity (if, indeed, translations can be said to demonstrate specific characteristics), as Baker (1993) predicted they would? Have they forced us to rethink any of the analytical categories we apply to translations, or told us anything new about how we can investigate the style of individual translators? In this paper I attempt to answer some of these questions, starting with the influence corpora have had on translation studies in general. 45
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2. How Influential Influential Has Corpus-based Corpus-based Translation Translation Studies Studies Been?
There is no doubt that there has been an impressive volume of activity within the area of corpus-based translation studies. Several monographs (see, for example, Kenny 2001; Laviosa 2002; Olohan 2004), collected volumes (for example, Zanettin et al. 2003; Mauranen and Kujamäki 2004) and special issues of journals (Laviosa 1998, Tagnin 2002, Kruger 2004a) have been published since the mid 1990s, and in August 2006 the Bibliography Bibliography of Translation Translation Studies Studies listed 370 publications concerned with corpus-based translation studies (although some of these may not have been based on electronic corpora). There is also a growing body of PhD dissertations, dissertations, and there have been a number of conferences and conference panels dedicated to the area (see Kruger 2004b: 2). Corpus-based translation studies thus appears to be well established by now. The potential contribution of corpora to the discipline at large has also been acknowledged by translation theorists operating outside of corpusbased translation studies as such, including those who present a bird’s eye view of translation studies. Corpora thus get a brief mention in Munday’s (2001) Introducing Introduc ing Translation Translat ion Studies , although he suggests that their application in translation studies was still “limited” at the time, and in his Venuti (2000: 335) speaks of the “powerful Translation Studies Reader Venuti analytic tools” that corpus linguistics offers translation scholarship. In what is simultaneously a cautious and a bold statement, Mason (2004) describes corpus-based translation translation studies as “what many would see as the future of empirical studies of translating”. This blend of optimism and caution is perhaps well advised. On the one hand, it becomes very clear to researchers who need to analyse linguistic features (1) whose formal realisation is highly predictable and (2) which are so frequent that the analyst would not be able to cope unaided with the amount of data that is extractable from even a modestly sized collection of texts, that a (semi-) automatically searchable corpus of electronic texts is the ideal resource to use. On the other hand, there are many features of texts that are worthy of investigation but whose formal realisation is less predictable and thus less amenable to detection using corpus tools. And even if corpus tools can be used to detect instances of certain features, they certainly can’t be used to “analyse” such features in depth or to contextualise whole texts. This type of work is still the preserve of human analysts. So those on the outside outs ide looking in keep a watching brief 46
Corpus-based Translation Translation Studies: A Quantitative or Qualitative Development?
on corpus-based translation studies, often betraying equal measures of interest and scepticism, but we can’t say that corpus techniques have been adopted wholesale in empirical translation studies, and nor would we recommend that they should be. 3. Have Corpora Corpora Helped Helped Us Us to Defin Definee Our Obje Object ct of Inquiry?
One early attempt to define the object of inquiry in translation studies from a specifically corpus-oriented point of view focused on the issue of representativeness in corpus design: Halverson (1998) proposed the building of translation corpora whose centre would be occupied by “prototypical” translations, that is those carried out by professionals (for Western cultures at least), and in which other (lower status) translations would occupy the periphery. Tymoczko (1998) countered that rather than becoming a vehicle for institutionalising certain translation practices, or valorising one type of translation over another, corpora could encourage an inclusive, decentring, dynamic type of translation studies. If defining the object of inquiry meant fixing the boundaries to the population of what would be known as translation, then this project appeared misguided to Tymoczko, and does not appear to have been pursued to any great extent in corpus-based translation studies, although sampling remains an issue that all corpus builders have to contend with. A second avenue in the attempt to set translation off from other objects of study involves the investigation of recurrent features of translation. In Baker’s (1993) early article, she argued that corpora could be used to investigate certain behaviours thought to be so characteristic of translation that they could be called “universals”. 2 While the whole of idea of “universals” has been controversial, the programme of research designed to uncover them has yielded much evidence that “demands interpretation” (Mauranen and Kujamäki 2004: 2). Repeated studies have shown, for example, that the tendency to explicitate is extremely common in translation. This is manifest in translations that are grammatically or otherwise more explicit than comparable texts written in the target language, or in translations that make explicit in the target text information that was merely implicit in the source text. A by now well-known example of the former case is Olohan and Baker’s (2000) finding that the optional connector (or “complementizer”) that is far more frequent in texts translated into English than in texts originally written in English. An 47
Journal of Translation Translation Studies Studies 9(1) (2006)
example of the latter is the follow-up study by Kenny (2005), which showed that while patterns of omission of that after the verb SAY in translated English texts tended to reflect patterns of omission of the equally optional connector daß (or dass, in the new German spelling) in the German source texts investigated, patterns of inclusion of that did not reflect in any predictable way patterns of inclusion of daß , and the tendency was clearly for translators to introduce an optional that in in their target texts regardless of what the source text looked like. These and other studies suggest that explicitation must take a special place in the battery of textual interventions made by translators, although we can by no means claim that it is peculiar to translation. 4. Have Have Corpora Corpora Helpe Helped d Us to Refine Refine Our Our Analyti Analytical cal Categories?
Another way to gauge the influence of corpus-based translation studies on the discipline at large relates to the above question. If it could be shown that a specifically corpus-based approach had led to new insights that caused us to rethink certain fundamental categories in translation studies, then this would indeed be a contribution to the wider area. While it is not evident that this has actually happened, in Kenny (forthcoming) I discuss the potential for parallel corpora (i.e., collections of source texts alongside their translations) in particular to shed new light on the nature of translation units (considered here to be a basic analytical category, given their prominence in, for example, process-oriented translation studies and pedagogical approaches to translation). I contrast differing conceptualisations of the translation unit in comparative stylistics, process-oriented translation studies, descriptive translation studies, and Natural Language Processing, and suggest that while the latter appears to make better use of the searchability and retrievability of information from electronic corpora, it is Toury’s (1995) “coupled-pair” approach that might best suit a humanities-oriented corpus-based translation studies. Toury’s coupled pairs (ibid.: 78–79) refer to mappings between segments of source texts and segments of target texts for which it is possible to claim that there are “no leftovers” outside the target text segment to the solution of a translation problem presented by the source text segment. I also ask whether the “extended units of meaning” (see also the discussion of Sinclair 1996 above) whose identification is facilitated using corpus techniques might coincide with translation units. Taking 48
Corpus-based Translation Translation Studies: A Quantitative or Qualitative Development?
repeated patterns from a corpus of German source texts and their translations into English, I argue that prototypical translations (as evidenced by the fact that they are recorded in bilingual dictionaries or appear frequently in parallel corpora) can point to extended units of meaning in source texts (see also Kenny 2004). The investigation of prototypical and non-prototypical translations can then indicate how translators have handled what a source-language speaker is likely to interpret as a single meaning unit. Thus the identification of extended units of meaning and units of translation can go hand in hand, even if it is not the case that the two are always co-terminous. Corpus evidence is also used to lend empirical support to Paul Bennett’s (1994) treatment of translation units, which distinguishes between a translation atom, a stretch of text that should not be translated compositionally if the translator wishes to avoid “over-translation” (Vinay and Darbelnet 1995:16) and the translation focus, the part of the source text that is currently occupying the translator’s attention. Specifically, it is argued that “the ST part of a coupled pair (often a translation ‘atom’) and the parts of the ST that must be kept in focus to arrive at a TT solution do not necessarily coincide” (Kenny forthcoming). The interaction of analytical categories such as unit of meaning, translation atom, translation focus, etc, is complex, but it is hoped that a single example (borrowed from Kenny forthcoming, where these matters are discussed in far greater detail) might help clarify matters here: Table 1 shows a non-exhaustive extract from a concordance for the search phrase mit all* in the German novels contained in the German-English Parallel Corpus of Literary Texts, or Gepcolt (see Kenny 2001). In the extract a
Table 1: mit all* concordance all* concordance
ff angefroren sein mußte. Sie versuchte mit aller Kraft, bei klarem Verstand zu n aus den Gedanken, in denen er steckt, mit aller Kraft herausziehen, doch selbs e Stopfnadel aus meinem Handarbeitszeug mit aller Kraft, und wenn ich sage Kraft ahrtendolch in Pension ist, und posiert mit aller Kraft wie auf Sophies Bruderfo hlieflend ersticht er die tote Schwester mit aller Kraft. Dann ist er endlich dam der Kurt Lukas war, schien sein Messer mit aller Kraft in die Hündin zu treiben hle Bäume vor dem Feld, der Mann rannte mit aller Kraft, das sah ich an den gewö tarre der Meereisdecke ziehen die Hunde mit aller Kraft nach der nächstgelegenen ultern gegen die Matratze, stemmte mich mit aller Kraft gegen seinen Amoklauf, e hte lebenden Embryo-Gesichter, scheinen mit aller Kraft von der Sonne angezogen eren Glas-Röhrchen auf ihr Blut warten, mit aller Kraft und Empörung auf den Fuß
49
Journal of Translation Translation Studies Studies 9(1) (2006)
repeated pattern mit aller Kraft is is very much in evidence. This pattern, which, along with a number of variations discussed in Kenny (forthcoming), roughly translates as “with all one’s might”, can be taken to constitute a single unit of meaning, by virtue of its apparent existence as a prefabricated unit of the type described by Sinclair (1996) and discussed above. (I take it that no linguist would argue that the phrase is created anew each time it is used). A deeper analysis of the co-text surrounding the phrase mit aller Kraft suggests that it has a strong affinity with, or “semantic preference” (Sinclair 1996) for verbs that denote an expenditure of effort, and even the use of extreme physical force. There is also bilingual evidence from Gepcolt (and which is presented in Kenny forthcoming) to show that the translation of mit aller Kraft is is influenced by the verb with which the phrase co-occurs. What becomes very clear from the (truncated) bilingual data supplied in Table 2 here, however, is that the phrase cannot usually be translated without access to knowledge of the subject of the clause in which this phrase appears as an adjunct (hence variations such as with all his/my/her might ). ). So what do examples such as this tell us about the boundaries of translation units? or the overlap between units of meaning and translation units? not to mention the stability or the supposed context-independence of translation equivalents? In Kenny (forthcoming) I argue that the phrases “with all her strength”, “with all his might”, etc, contain all the solution (with no “leftovers”) to the problem posed by mit aller Kraft , and thus that they constitute “coupled pairs” with the German, and translation units for
Table 2: Translation ranslationss in Gepcolt for for mit aller Kraf
mit aller Kraft
50
1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.
with all her strength with with all all our our stre streng ngth th *forc force/ e/fu full ll forc forcee as well well as he’ he’s able able with al all hi his mi might with al all hi his mi might for al all he he was was worth *stra strain in ever everyy mus muscl clee with all my might by ever everyy fibre fibre of of their their bein beingg with with all her her might might and indig indignat nation ion
Corpus-based Translation Translation Studies: A Quantitative or Qualitative Development?
our purposes. At the same time, the source of part of the solution (i.e. knowledge of the agent) lies outside the solution itself, and thus the translator must maintain attentional focus on the whole clause when translating mit aller Kraft . Here we have a case of the clause operating as the “macro-unit” (Bennett 1994). 3 So the distinction between translation unit and translation focus appears to be well motivated. Having said that, it is possible to argue, based on experience and corpus evidence, that translators work with units more extensive than phrases such as mit aller Kraft , and that subject, verb and adjunct, which together might constitute some kind of extended unit of meaning à la Sinclair, are all somehow translated “together”. Without access to detailed information on the translation process, however, this avenue appears difficult to pursue within “traditional” corpus-based translation studies, although the triangulation of process-oriented and product-oriented data could prove useful here. It is clear however, that the kind of translation unit evidenced by the mit aller Kraft examples shows once again that translations, even of apparently simple phrases, can be highly context-dependent, without being idiosyncratic. This appears to be an inconvenient fact to many working in the field of Natural Language Processing (see Kenny forthcoming), where highly predictable “correspondences” between, e.g., lexical units, are prioritised over messier, less predictable “equivalents”. 4 Although such work is only now beginning, it is hoped that the constant testing of analytical categories in translation studies against data contained in parallel corpora, will lead to greater conceptual clarification in translation studies as a whole. 5. And And What What of of the the Tran Transl slato ator? r?
Another area in which corpora have the potential to make a significant contribution is in the study of the sometimes elusive “translator’s voice”. Corpora have already been used to reveal the presence presen ce of the translator, and to reveal new ways in which this presence can be traced. An example of this type of research is Bosseaux’s (2004) investigation of deictic elements in two translations into French of Virginia Wolff’s The Waves. As had been shown in previous studies based on non-electronic corpora (for example, Mason and Serban 2003), adverbs and pronouns such as here and there, this and that , and now and then, serve to indicate the “viewing position assumed by the narrator” (Bosseaux ibid.: 260), in other words the narrator’s spatial point of view, as well as the “temporal dimension in ¸
51
Journal of Translation Translation Studies Studies 9(1) (2006)
which the subject of the fiction is framed” (ibid.), or temporal point of view. The deictic shifts that often happen in translation (Bosseaux ibid.; Winters 2005; Mason and Serban ibid.) thus combine to produce more or less subtle shifts in narrative point of view, and it can be shown that the translator-narrator’s point of view can differ from that of the original author. Even in cases where a target text is “fluent” and the translator’s visibility to the target text reader is thus diminished (Venuti 1995: 2), the translator’s presence in the text can still be brought out by the analyst who is equipped with appropriate analytical categories and a sufficiently large corpus. A related study that relies on corpus tools to extract, sort and display thousands of instances of formally predictable features is Winters (2005). 5 Winters tracks the use of modal particles, a German word-class used principally to express speakers’ (or writers’) attitudes to their utterances, in two translations of Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned . The use of epistemic modal particles like wohl can change the psychological point of view in a narrative, by expressing uncertainty about the content of an utterance. Depending Depending on the placement of the particle, the uncertainty may be understood to operate at the level of a character, or the narrator. In some cases in Winters’ study, the addition of a modal particle makes it appear that the translator has better access to a character’s thought processes than did the original narrator. In other cases, the addition of a modal particle suggests that the narrator is less sure of characters’ motives than she/he might otherwise be. In Winters’ words: ¸
The narrator generally used in The Beautiful and Damned is is the omniscient Type B narrator, who knows the characters’ thoughts and feelings. In the instances which contain epistemic modality on the narrator’s level, the narrator becomes an external Type D narrator, whose knowledge is limited and who does not have access to the characters’ inner states.6
The following example demonstrates a shift from the relative certainty of a character’s position in Scott Fitzgerald’s (FSF) original to the relative uncertainty of the same character’s position in Renate Orth-Guttmann’s (ROG) translation, whereby the positing of such uncertainty on the character level (largely realised through the modal particle wohl) can be understood as the translator enjoying greater insight into the character’s psyche than did the original author (emphases mine) FSF: He considered, nevertheless, that he had given her an object-lesson and that the the matter was closed… 52
Corpus-based Translation Translation Studies: A Quantitative or Qualitative Development?
HCO: Nichtsdestoweniger war er der Meinung, daß er ihr einen Denkzettel verpaflt hatte und daß die Sache damit erledigt war… ROG: Immerhin, sagte er sich, habe er ihr eine Lektion erteilt und damit sei der Fall wohl erledigt.
This increased insight into the character’s psyche is supported by the use of other devices that shift the focus from the narrator to the character in Orth-Guttmann’s translation. For example, Scott Fitzgerald uses reported indirect thought, in which a thought-act report verb considered is accompanied twice by the complementizer that , which has the effect of giving prominence to the fact that something is being reported, and hence to the act of narration, while in some ways delaying what is is being reported. The adversative conjunction nevertheless can be considered as operating on the narrator’s level (i.e., it is the narrator who understands there to be some tension between what has been reported previously and what is about to be reported). The translation by Hans Christian Oeser (HCO) maintains this foregrounding of the narration through the use of a similar thought-act thought-act report verb war er der Meinung (“he was of the opinion”) in conjunction with two instances of the complementizer daß in German. Likewise, his placement of the equivalent of nevertheless (“nichtsdestoweniger”) allows the recognition of a tension to operate on the level of the narrator. Renate Orth-Guttmann, on the other hand, uses a verb that points to a reported internal speech act sagte er sich (“he said to himself”) in her reporting clause, which suggests greater immediacy and a more faithful rendering of Anthony’s original thought, and that it is Anthony who recognises a tension, expressed through the conjunction immerhin (“nevertheless”), rather than the narrator. Orth-Guttmann also eschews use of the German complementizer daß ,7 and thus does not postpone the introduction of Anthony’s thoughts in the same way as Scott Fitzgerald and Oeser do. Crucially, however, it is the introduction of the modal particle wohl in the reported clause in Orth-Guttmann’s Orth-Guttmann’s translation that suggests that Anthony is not entirely sure that the matter really is closed, and thus that OrthGuttmann, who appears to focus more on character’s internal states than on the narration in general, has once again greater access to characters’ psyches than do either Scott Fitzgerald or Oeser. By revealing instances of where modal particles cause shifts in the psychological point of view between original and target text, as well as differences in point of view that arise between the two translations, Winters reveals a previously unexplored way in which the translator’s 53
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presence in the text can be felt, at least by a sensitive analyst. This level of innovation would not have been possible had the researcher not had at her disposal a sufficiently large electronic corpus and tools to manipulate it, and had she not taken a “data-driven” approach, from which hypotheses emerged following an initial “word crunching” phase in which differing distributions of certain modal particles were observed in the two translations. 6. Conc Conclu lusi sio ons
Corpus-based translation studies is still relatively young, but researchers working in the area have already managed to generate an impressive number of studies that reveal new ways of investigating sometimes new questions, and that have the potential to force us to revisit some basic concepts in translation studies. Although certain research agendas in the area have met with greater acceptance than others, it seems clear that corpus-based translation studies is here to stay. In fact, as instruction in corpus analysis techniques becomes more commonplace on translation programmes worldwide, we can expect corpora to become just another resource used by translation scholars — and when that happens, they will have been truly mainstreamed. Acknowledgement
This is an expanded and updated version of a paper originally presented at the Intern Internati ationa onall Sympos Symposium ium on New Horizo Horizons ns in Theore Theoretic tical al Transl Translati ation on Studie Studiess
at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Department of Translation, from 19–20 January 2006. The author is grateful to the two anonymous reviewers who provided very useful feedback on an earlier version. Notes 1. These comments comments notwit notwithstan hstanding, ding, there remain remain,, of course, course, areas areas of lingui linguistics stics where researchers do not rely upon corpora as sources of data. 2. On the declin declining ing populari popularity ty of the the term “unive “universals rsals of of translation translation”, ”, see Williams (2004: 206). Note, however, that some theorists continue to use the term (Mauranen and Kujamäki 2004). 3. For instanc instances es where where the text text function functionss as “macro-u “macro-unit” nit”,, see Kenny Kenny (2001: (2001: 163– 163– 67). 54
Corpus-based Translation Translation Studies: A Quantitative or Qualitative Development?
4. See Santos Santos (2000), (2000), for for a counter-ex counter-exampl amplee within within an NLP publicat publication ion,, and Kraif Kraif (2003) for an excellent discussion of one NLP approach to “lexical correspondences” and “translational equivalents”. 5. My descript description ion here here of Bosseaux Bosseaux (2004) (2004) and Winters Winters (2005) (2005) is, of course, course, incomplete. Both authors consider other linguistic features (as we shall see below for Winters), for example, the use of modal verbs, transitivity, and speech act report verbs, in their treatments of the translator’s voice/style. 6. Winters Winters (ibid.) (ibid.) broadly broadly follows follows Fowler’s Fowler’s (1996) (1996) model model of psychol psychological ogical point of view, positing four types of narrator: Type A is an “internal” narrator, who has access to characters’ consciousness, and tells the story from the point of view of a participating character; Type B is also an internal narrator, but narrates from the point of view of a non-participating character; Types C and D are both “external”, that is they do not have access to characters’ consciousness. They differ in that Type C remains neutral and impersonal, whereas Type D narrators give their opinions and offer subjective judgements. 7. Note, Note, howev however, er, that that Orth Orth-Gu -Guttm ttmann ann uses uses the the Konjunktiv I verb verb forms habe and sei to indicate the presence of reported speech.
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Journal of Translation Translation Studies Studies 9(1) (2006)
Received in December 2005 Revised and accepted in August 2006 Author’s address: School of Applied Language and Intercultural Studies Dublin City University Republic of Ireland
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