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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. 252–275

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Functional hybridity in translation

A multifactorial perspective on the English gerund in the language pairs English-German and English-Dutch

ORCiD logo with link | KU Leuven (Belgium)
ORCiD logo with link | KU Leuven (Belgium)
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at rights@benjamins.nl.

Open Access publication of this article was funded through a Transformative Agreement with KU Leuven.

Published online: 10 October 2023
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/lic.00029.mae
Abstract
The present study addresses a topic on the crossroads between contrastive linguistics and translation studies as we seek to investigate how the English verbal gerund is used in translated and non-translated English, as well as how it is translated into German and Dutch. Instead of merely analysing frequencies throughout a corpus, we aim to map out usage profiles and translation strategies through a multi-methodological and multifactorial approach, thereby offering a more contextualized approach to the English verbal gerund. On the basis of data from CroCo and DPC, two parallel and comparable corpora for the language pairs English-German and English-Dutch, a set of over 6,000 verbal gerunds was annotated. A hierarchical configural frequency analysis was conducted to uncover different usage profiles or ‘types’ of verbal gerunds. Second, a conditional inference tree and a random forest analysis were modelled to select the best predictors to help distinguish between a nominal or a clausal translation solution. In addition to providing more insight into the status of English verbal gerunds in translation, this paper offers new perspectives on two broader debates in contrastive linguistics and translation studies, viz. the ‘loose-fit’ or ‘tight-fit’ status of constructions and the treatment of unique items respectively.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The English gerund: Views from contrastive linguistics and translation studies
    • 2.1English gerunds as ‘loose-fit’ structures
    • 2.2English gerunds as ‘unique items’
  • 3.Research questions and methodology
    • 3.1Research questions
    • 3.2Data and methodology
      • 3.2.1Data extraction and annotation
      • 3.2.2Data analysis
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1Functional subtypes
      • 4.1.1Functional subtypes in CroCo
      • 4.1.2Functional subtypes in DPC
      • 4.1.3Functional subtypes: Interim summary
    • 4.2Translation equivalents
  • 5.Conclusion and outlook
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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