Is translated language more standardized than non-translated language?
Using profile-based correspondence analysis for measuring linguistic distances between language varieties.
Published online: 25 February 2013
https://doi.org/10.1075/target.24.2.01del
https://doi.org/10.1075/target.24.2.01del
With this article, we seek to support the law of growing standardization by showing that texts translated into Belgian Dutch make more use of standard language than non-translated Belgian Dutch texts. Additionally, we want to examine whether the use of standard vs. non-standard language can be attributed to the variables text type and source language. In order to achieve that goal, we gathered a diverse set of linguistic variables and used a 10-million-word corpus that is parallel, comparable and bidirectional (the Dutch Parallel Corpus; Macken, Lieve, Orphée De Clercq, and Hans Paulussen. 2011. “Dutch Parallel Corpus: A Balanced Copyright-Cleared Parallel Corpus.” Meta 56 (2): 374–390. ). The frequency counts for each of the variables are used to determine the differences in standard language use by means of profile-based correspondence analysis (Plevoets, Koen. 2008. Tussen spreek- en standaardtaal. Een corpusgebaseerd onderzoek naar de situationele, regionale en sociale verspreiding van enkele morfosyntactische verschijnselen uit het gesproken Belgisch–Nederlands. Doctoral dissertation. Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Leuven.). The results of our analysis show that (i) in general, there is indeed a standardizing trend among translations and (ii) text types with a lot of editorial control (fiction, non-fiction and journalistic texts) contain more standard language than the less edited text types (administrative texts and external communication) which adds support for the idea that the differences between translated and non-translated texts are text type dependent.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.Theoretical background
- 2.1The law of growing standardization
- 2.2The language situation of Belgian Dutch
- 3.Methodology
- 3.1Hypothesis and variables selection
- 3.2Corpus and data extraction
- 3.3Manual validation
- 3.4Profile-based correspondence analysis
- 3.5Two-dimensional plots and interpretation
- 4.Results
- 5.Conclusions and suggestions for future work
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
References
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