Semantic prosody and specialised translation, or how a lexico-grammatical theory of language can help with specialised translation

Corpus linguistics has invaded translation studies and practice over the last fifteen years, allowing researchers to analyse the language of translation or to use corpora as tools in the translation process. This study deals with the application of a theoretical and methodological corpus linguistics approach to pragmatic translation, more precisely with the analysis of semantic prosody in a contrastive study both between French and English, and between general and specialised language. The data confirm that semantic prosody does not present a univocal matching between two languages. Moreover, the study demonstrates the need for corpus data over intuition to understand the fluctuation of semantic prosody between general language and languages for specific purposes. Finally, the question of translation based on corpus data will be addressed. Keywords: semantic prosody; English-French contrastive analysis; general language; languages for specific purposes; specialised translation; pragmatic translation