Cover not available

Article published In: Discourse Analysis in Translation Studies
Edited by Jeremy Munday and Meifang Zhang
[Target 27:3] 2015
► pp. 351–369

Get fulltext from our e-platform
JBE logo with link
PDF logo with download linkDownload PDF
authorization required

Contrastive studies of cohesion and their impact on our knowledge of translation (English-German)

 | Universität des Saarlandes
Published online: 22 October 2015
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/target.27.3.02ste
Abstract
This article starts from the claim that knowledge about contrastive systems of cohesion and textual instantiations of these systems between English and German is important for translation, but that this knowledge is still fragmentary and insufficiently supported by empirical studies. This claim will be followed by three generalizing assumptions about contrastive differences in English-German cohesion which relate to (1) different degrees of local encoding of ambiguity in texts in terms of co-reference, (2) different degrees of registerial distinctions along the written-spoken and formal-informal distinctions, and (3) different orientations of discourses along the explicitness and information-density dimensions. These assumptions are being tested in corpus-based work in our group, and the currently available results will be summarized. The summary will be followed by a discussion and exemplification of implications for translation in both directions between English and German. As will be seen, an awareness of the main differences between English and German cohesion, between registers within these two languages and between written and spoken modes in particular are an important background for guiding translation strategies.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Some assumptions about contrastive differences in cohesion
  • 3.Some results from a corpus-based study
    • 3.1A corpus architecture for studying contrasts in English-German cohesion
    • 3.2Some early findings
      • 3.2.1Systemic comparison
      • 3.2.2Quantitative textual findings
  • 4.Implications for translation
    • 4.1General
    • 4.2Translation direction English > German
    • 4.3Translation direction German > English
  • 5.Conclusion and future work
  • Acknowledgements
  • References
References (47)
References
Alves, Fabio, Adriana Pagano, Stella Neumann, Erich Steiner, and Silvia Hansen-Schirra. 2010. “Translation Units and Grammatical Shifts: Towards an Integration of Product- and Process-based Translation Research.” In Translation and Cognition, ed. by Gregory M. Shreve and Erik Angelone, 109–141. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Amoia, Marilisa, Kerstin Kunz, and Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski. 2012. “Co-reference in Spoken vs. Written Text: A Corpus-based Analysis.” Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC2012) Istanbul, Turkey.
Ariel, Mira. 2001. “Accessibility Theory: An Overview.” In Text Representation: Linguistic and Psycholinguistic Aspects, ed. by Ted Sanders, Joost Schilperoord, and Wilbert Spooren, 29–88. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Baker, Mona. 1992. In Other Words. A Coursebook on Translation. London: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Becher, Viktor. 2011. Explicitation and Implicitation in Translation. A Corpus-Based Study of English-German Translations of Business Texts. PhD diss. Hamburg University.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Biber, Douglas. 1988. Variation across Speech and Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Blum-Kulka, Shoshana. 1986. “Shifts of Cohesion and Coherence in Translation.” In Interlingual and Intercultural Communication: Discourse and Cognition in Translation and Second Language Acquisition Studies, ed. by Juliane House and Shoshana Blum-Kulka, 17–35. Tübingen: Narr.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Byatt, Antonia Susan. 1991. Possession. London: Vintage Books. Translated by Melanie Walz. 1994. Besessen. Frankfurt am Main: Büchergilde Gutenberg.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Collins, Peter. 2012. “Grammatical Variation in English Worldwide: The Role of Colloquialization.” Linguistics and the Human Sciences 8 (3): 289–306Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
CWB 2010. The IMS Open Corpus Workbench. Accessed April 2, 2015. [URL].
Doherty, Monika. 2002. Language Processing in Discourse. A Key to Felicitous Translation. London: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Eckert, Miriam, and Michael Strube. 2000. “Dialogue Acts, Synchronizing Units, and Anaphora Resolution.” Journal of Semantics 17 (1): 51–89. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Evert, Stefan. 2005. The CQP Query Language Tutorial. Institut fur Maschinelle Sprachverarbeitung (IMS), Universität Stuttgart, April. CWB version 2.2.b90.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fabricius-Hansen, Cathrine. 1996. “Informational Density: A Problem for Translation Theory.” Linguistics 34 (3): 521–565. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fawcett, Peter. 1997. Translation and Language. Linguistic Theories Explained. Manchester: St. Jerome.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fetzer, Anita, and Augustin Speyer. 2012. “Discourse Relations in English and German Discourse: Local and Not-so-local Constraints.” Intercultural Pragmatics 9 (4): 413–452. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Fischer, Klaus. 2013. Satzstrukturen im Deutschen und Englischen. Typologie und Textrealisierung [Sentence structures in German and English. Typology and text realization]. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Halliday, M.A.K.., and Ruqaiya Hasan. 1976. Cohesion in English. London: Longman.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hansen, Silvia. 2003. The Nature of Translated Text. An Interdisciplinary Methodology for the Investigation of the Specific Properties of Translations. Saarbrücken Dissertations in Computational Linguistics and Language Technology 8. Saarbrücken: German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hansen-Schirra, Silvia, Stella Neumann, and Erich Steiner. 2012. Cross-linguistic Corpora for the Study of Translations. Insights from the Language Pair English – German. Text, Translation, Computational Processing 11. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hatim, Basil, and Ian Mason. 1990. Discourse and the Translator. London: Longman.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Hawkins, John A. 1986. A Comparative Typology of English and German: Unifying the Contrasts. London: Croom Helm.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
House, Juliane. 1997. Translation Quality Assessment. Tübingen: Narr.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2011. “Linking Constructions in English and German Translated and Original Texts.” In Multilingual Discourse Production, ed. by Svenja Kranich, Viktor Becher, Steffen Hoeder, and Juliane House. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Klein, Daniel, and Chris D. Manning. 2003. “Accurate Unlexicalized Parsing.” Proceedings of the 41st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics , vol. 11, 423–430.
König, Ekkehard, and Volker Gast. 2012. Understanding English-German Contrasts. 3rd ed. Grundlagen der Anglistik und Amerikanistik 29. Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Königs, Karin. 2011. Übersetzen Englisch – Deutsch. Lernen mit System [English – German translation. Learn systematically]. 3rd ed. Munich: Oldenbourg Verlag.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kunz, Kerstin. 2009. Variation in English and German Co-reference. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kunz, Kerstin, and Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski. 2014. “Cohesive Conjunctions in English and German: Systemic Contrasts and Textual Differences.” In Recent Advances in Corpus Linguistics: Developing and Exploiting Corpora, ed. by Lieven Vandelanotte, Kristin Davidse, Caroline Gentens, and Ditte Kimps, 229–262. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kunz, Kerstin, and Erich Steiner. 2012. “Towards a Comparison of Cohesive Reference in English and German: System and Text.” Linguistics and the Human Sciences 6 (1-3): 219–251. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
. 2013. “Cohesive Substitution in English and German: A Contrastive and Corpus-Based Perspective.” In Advances in Corpus-Based Contrastive Linguistics. Studies in Honour of Stig Johansson, ed. by Karin Aijmer and Bengt Altenberg, 201–231. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Kunz, Kerstin, Stefania Degaetano-Ortlieb, Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski, Katrin Menzel and Erich Steiner. Forthcoming. “GECCo—An Empirically-based Comparison of English-German Cohesion.” In New Ways of Analysing Translational Behaviour in Corpus-Based Translation Studies, ed. by Gert de Sutter, Isabelle Delaere, and Marie-Aude Lefer. Berlin: Mouton De Gruyter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Leech, Geoffrey, Marianne Hundt, Christian Mair, and Nicholas Smith. 2009. Change in Contemporary English: A Grammatical Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Leisi, Ernst, and Christian Mair. 2008. Das heutige Englisch: Wesenszüge und Probleme [English today: characteristics and problems]. 9th ed. Heidelberg: Winter.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Levinson, Stephen C. 2000. Presumptive Meanings: The Theory of Generalized Conversational Implicature. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Mair, Christian. 2006. Twentieth-Century English. History, Variation and Standardization. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Matthiessen, Christian M.I.M. 2001. “The Environments of Translation.” In Exploring Translation and Multilingual Text Production: Beyond Content, ed. by Erich Steiner and Colin Yallop, 41–126. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.   Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Menzel, Katrin. 2014. “Ellipsen als Stil- und Kohäsionsmittel in deutschen und englischen politischen Reden [Ellipses as stylistic and cohesive resources in German and English political speeches].” Germanistische Mitteilungen. Zeitschrift für Deutsche Sprache, Literatur und Kultur 40 (1): 31–50.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Munday, Jeremy. 2012. Evaluation in Translation. Critical Points of Translator Decision-Making. Abingdon: Routledge. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Neumann, Stella. 2003. Textsorten und Übersetzen. Eine Korpusanalyse englischer und deutscher Reiseführer [Genres and translation. A corpus analysis of English and German travel guides]. Frankfurt am Main: Peter LangGoogle Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Piantadosi, Steven T., Harry Tily, and Edward Gibson. 2012. “The Communicative Function of Ambiguity in Language.” Cognition 122 (3): 280–291. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Siepmann, Dirk, John D. Gallagher, Mike Hannay, and J. Lachlan Mackenzie. 2008. Writing in English: A Guide for Advanced Learners. Tübingen: A. Francke Verlag.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Steiner, Erich. 2004. Translated Texts: Properties, Variants, Evaluations. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Steiner, Erich, and Elke Teich. 2004. “Metafunctional Profile of the Grammar of German.” In Language Typology: a Functional Perspective, ed. by Alice Caffarel, Jim Martin, and Christian M.I.M. Matthiessen, 139–184. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Steiner, Erich. 2005. “Some Properties of Lexicogrammatical Encoding and Their Implications for Situations of Language Contact and Multilinguality.” In In einer anderen Sprache [In a different language], ed. by Rita Franceschini, special issue of Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik (351): 54–75.Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Teich, Elke. 2003. Cross-linguistic Variation in System and Text – A Methodology for the Investigation of Translations and Comparable Texts. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar
Toutanova, Kristina, Dan Klein, Christopher D. Manning, and Yoram Singer. 2003. “Feature-rich Part-of-speech Tagging with a Cyclic Dependency Network.” NAACL ‘03: Proceedings of the 2003 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics on Human Language Technology , 173–180.
Cited by (8)

Cited by eight other publications

Yue, Yan & Jing Fang
2024. The role of registerial expertise in texture re-creation in medical translation. Language, Context and Text. The Social Semiotics Forum 6:2 ► pp. 418 ff. DOI logo
Chen, Shukun, Winfred Wenhui Xuan & Hailing Yu
2022. Applying systemic functional linguistics in translation studies. Babel. Revue internationale de la traduction / International Journal of Translation 68:4 ► pp. 517 ff. DOI logo
Mastropierro, Lorenzo & Michaela Mahlberg
2022. Key words and translated cohesion in Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness and one of its Italian translations. English Text Construction ► pp. 78 ff. DOI logo
Zeyrek, Deniz, Amália Mendes, Giedrė Valūnaitė Oleškevičienė & Sibel Özer
2022. An Exploratory Analysis of TED Talks in English and Lithuanian, Portuguese and Turkish Translations. Contrastive Pragmatics 3:3 ► pp. 452 ff. DOI logo
Kunz, Kerstin, Ekaterina Lapshinova-Koltunski, José Manuel Martínez Martínez, Katrin Menzel & Erich Steiner
2018. Shallow features as indicators of English–German contrasts in lexical cohesion. Languages in Contrast 18:2 ► pp. 175 ff. DOI logo
Speyer, Augustin & Anita Fetzer
2018. “Well would you believe it, I have failed the exam again”. Pragmatics and Society 9:1 ► pp. 26 ff. DOI logo
Vandepitte, Sonia
2018. Krisztina Károly. Across Languages and Cultures 19:2 ► pp. 279 ff. DOI logo
Castagnoli, Sara
2016. Investigating trainee translators’ contrastive pragmalinguistic competence: a corpus-based analysis of interclausal linkage in learner translations. The Interpreter and Translator Trainer 10:3 ► pp. 343 ff. DOI logo

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 4 december 2025. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Mobile Menu Logo with link to supplementary files background Layer 1 prag Twitter_Logo_Blue