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Article published In: Converging paradigms in contrastive and translation studies: Crosslinguistic corpus perspectives
Edited by Silvia Bernardini and Adriano Ferraresi
[Languages in Contrast 23:2] 2023
► pp. 161–198

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Verbs of perception and evidentiality in English/French translation

 | Université Paris 8 Vincennes-St. Denis (France)
Published online: 24 November 2023
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https://doi.org/10.1075/lic.00028.hen
Abstract
Differences between verbs of perception in English and French have often been a subject of theoretical conjecture, but seldom studied empirically. Four such verbs (En. hear, see, Fr. entendre, voir) were thus inventoried in a 13.5m-word bidirectional English/French translation corpus. A statistically significant difference between translators and authors was found for hear and entendre. Correlations between source and target texts were statistically significant for all verbs. Quantitative analysis of random samples revealed five regular alternatives to word-for-word translation. Qualitative data support the hypothesis that verbs of perception may follow different “evidential strategies” in English and French. An approach combining quantitative and qualitative analysis to identify translators closest to target language norms offers a new model for researchers and translators.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Methods
    • 2.1Corpus design
    • 2.2Data collection
    • 2.3Data analysis
  • 3.Results
    • 3.1‘Hear’/‘Entendre’
      • 3.1.1Target texts (translators) vs. target language norms (authors)
      • 3.1.2Source/Target correlation
      • 3.1.3Qualitative classification
        • Target counterparts of ‘hear’ (En0→FtrE)
        • Source counterparts of ‘entendre’’(En0→FtrE)
        • Target counterparts of ‘entendre’(Fr0→EtrF)
        • Source counterparts of ‘hear’ (Fr0→EtrF)
    • 3.2‘See’/‘Voir’
      • 3.2.1Translators vs. authors (target texts vs. target language norms)
      • 3.2.2Source/Target correlation
      • 3.2.3Qualitative classification
        • Target counterparts of see (En0→FtrE)
        • Source counterparts of voir (En0→FtrE)
        • Target counterparts of voir (Fr0→EtrF)
        • Source counterparts of see (Fr0→EtrF)
  • 4.Discussion
  • 5.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
References (39)
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