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Article published In: Corpus-Based Research in Legal and Institutional Translation
Edited by Fernando Prieto Ramos
[Translation Spaces 8:1] 2019
► pp. 67–92

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The formulaicity of translations across EU institutional genres

A corpus-driven analysis of lexical bundles in translated and non-translated language

ORCiD logo with link | University of Warsaw
ORCiD logo with link | University of Warsaw
ORCiD logo with link | University of Warsaw
Published online: 26 June 2019
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/ts.00013.bie
Abstract
This paper explores the formulaicity of EU translations into Polish across four institutional genres (legislation, judgments, reports, websites) with reference to the corresponding EU English corpora in order to understand how the degree of formulaicity is affected by the variable of genre. Formulaicity is operationalised as lexical bundles – high-frequency multi-word sequences (Biber, Douglas, and Federica Barbieri. 2007. “Lexical Bundles in University Spoken and Written Registers.” English for Specific Purposes 26 (3): 263–286. Google Scholar logo with link to Google Scholar). The study shows a strong correlation between formulaicity and genres, as well as multiple facets of formulaicity (e.g. tokens vs. types). Our findings generally confirm the increased aggregate formulaicity of translations as regards bundle tokens for all EU genres, except for judgments, and the increased variation of bundles (types) for all the genres at the 40 occurrences per million words (pmw) threshold, although the “micro-formulaicity” threshold yielded inconclusive results. Another finding reveals a consistently low overlap of bundles between translations and non-translations. We argue that translations develop their own formulaic profiles which are levelled out compared to EU English corpora and which minimally overlap with formulaic profiles of domestic genres.
Article outline
  • Institutional genres: EU transgenres
  • Lexical bundles as a new construct measuring the formulaicity of legal discourse and translation
  • Corpus design
  • Corpus-driven analysis of lexical bundles in the genre-based Eurolect corpora
    • The aggregate distribution of lexical bundles (2–8 grams): A global picture
    • Analysis of 3-grams and 4-grams: A local view
    • Overlap of 4-grams in the translation and non-translation corpora
  • Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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