The metaphor of “doing one's homework” is being used frequently in political discourse in many languages and countries throughout the world. It is applied to a single person, for instance when Hillary Clinton claimed that Bernie Sanders “hadn't done his homework” (Klett 2016), to countries, for instance in the Eurozone crisis (“Es hora de que algunos dirigentes europeos piensen que hacer los deberes no sólo es algo que atañe a los países del sur, sino a todos”, [‘It's time that some European leaders realized that doing homework is not only an issue for countries of the south, but for all of them’], Laborda 2014), or even to entire populations, when Hamed Abdel-Samad argues that “die arabische Welt hat jahrhundertelang ihre Hausaufgaben nicht gemacht” (‘the Arabic world hasn't done its homework for centuries’, Abdel-Samad 2015). In the TIME corpus (http://corpus.byu.edu/time/), the use of the word homework, irrespective of metaphoricity, has increased from 55.57 instances per million words (i/mw) in the 1980s to 130.66 i/mw in the 1990s and 164.30 i/mw in the 2000s. While the recent widespread application of the metaphor may turn it into a set phrase, the metaphor itself is by no means new. The term “homework” was used metaphorically in the British parliament as early as 1948: “If he had really done his homework in reading the Agreement [...] I do not think he would have asked that question” (HANSARD corpus (http://www.hansard-corpus.org/), 6 July 1948, “European Economic Cooperation”).

In terms of frame theory (see, for instance, Sullivan 2013: 18-19), the use of the homework metaphor evokes the frame of “school”. Pragmatically, the metaphor seems to have been used initially as a mitigating choice (“bush”, Caffi 2007: 98) as a way to soften (see Martin & White 2005: 138) the criticism of the lack of preparation of someone else. Today, it is often interpreted as a condescending way of criticism. Thus, the leader of country A saying that country B has not done its homework may imply that the homework was in fact set by the leader of country A. The mitigating effect is thus lost, a possibility that is mentioned by Caffi (2007: 100) as a potential cost if the addressee of the expression feels treated condescendingly.

The aim of this study is to investigate the pragmatic development of the “homework” metaphor cross-linguistically in English, German, Spanish and Catalan political newspaper discourse. The analysis will draw on publicly available corpora of newspaper articles and combine a quantitative and qualitative analysis. In the quantitative part, metaphorical occurrences of the metaphor will be registered in order to find out which language communities adopted the metaphor at what point and how it diffused from then onwards. The qualitative part will trace a possible pragmatic shift in the mitigating potential of the metaphor: an appraisal-based analysis (Martin & White 2005) will differentiate the use of the metaphor in positive contexts, e.g. where someone has done their homework, neutral contexts, e.g. where someone has been set homework, and negative contexts, e.g. where someone has not done their homework. The results will provide a comprehensive overview of the emergence, use and pragmatic effects of the “homework” metaphor.

References

Caffi, Claudia. 2007. Mitigation. Amsterdam: Elsevier.

Klett, Steven. 2016. Hillary Clinton: Sanders “hasn’t done his homework”. The Epoch Times 6 April 2016. Available at http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/2015157-hillary-clinton-sanders-hasnt-done-his-homework/.

Laborda, Ángel. 2014. Deberes tenemos todos. El País 12 October 2014. Available at http://economia.elpais.com/economia/2014/10/10/actualidad/1412959024_744439.html.

Martin, James R., and Peter R. R. White. 2005. The Language of Evaluation: Appraisal in English. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Sullivan, Karen. 2013. Frames and Constructions in Metaphoric Language. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Principal Investigator: Montserrat González Cóndom

Taking our current project MODEVIG as a starting point, the general aim of MODEVIGTRAD is to advance in the study of the evidential and epistemic strategies present in specific discourse genres that show a high degree of evaluative language and modalisation. Based on the theoretical frameworks of systemic-functional grammar, enunciative linguistics and cognitive linguistics, the proposed approach will be communicative and multimodal in nature, and will take into account interaction, participants and cognitive and situational contexts. The methodological approach is contrastive, with five working languages (Spanish, Catalan, English, German and French), and will have a direct application in translation studies, lexicography and pragmatic discourse studies.

In any communicative exchange, senders draw on evidential strategies to encode their sources of knowledge and to justify their assertion to the receiver. Such evidential information endows the message with authority and reliability. In addition, epistemic modal markers (verbs, adverbs, adjectives, adverbials) enable senders to encode the degree of certainty in relation to the propositional content, and to transmit their beliefs, attitudes and degree of commitment to that content. In this project we examine the need of the sender of a message to transmit evidential and epistemic (attitudinal) information in discourse genres in which the context and the transmission of emotions play a crucial role.

The genres and texts we aim to investigate (mainly digital) are: (a) Internet fora, which seek to reproduce spoken language and sender-receiver proximity; (b) newspaper articles and opinion articles on current hot issues, in which speakers show a great degree of commitment to their assertions; (c) medical-science popularisation articles with a high degree of metaphorical language that modalises the propositional content of the news or medical report (d) cyber-literary texts, i.e. multimodal products combining verbal language with image and music; (e) academic texts interpreting literary works of reference and using a high degree of modalisation.

Thus, MODEVIGTRAD's specific aims are:

1. to relate the communicative context with evidential and epistemic linguistic uses
2. to delve deeper into the relationship between objectivity, subjectivity and intersubjectivity in the use of the units analysed
3. to propose plausible theoretical interpretations and approximations to the evidential, epistemic and intensifying functions present in texts of discourse genres with a high degree of evaluative language and modalisation
4. to contribute contrastive studies to the field of translation

When we talk about phenomena of translated language, we usually equate translated language with the language we find in translated books, magazines, newspapers or other such published translations. What we often forget is that in the production of translated documents, there are many intermediate stages such as revision, copyediting or proofing (Mossop 2007) where the language in the text is changed, sometimes significantly.

Most product-based research often necessarily relies on published sources. Indeed, the corpus method in translation studies derives its empirical strength largely from the fact that it allows analyses of ‘authentic data, as attested in texts’ (Kenny 2009). Exclusive reliance on published sources in corpus construction, however, leads to a continued neglection of the linguistic modifications that are made during the editing stage of the translation process.

Translation scholars agree that the study of editorial intervention is an important research area. Muñoz Martín (2010) suggests three levels of understanding of the term ‘translation process’. One of those he defines as ‘the period commencing from the moment the client contacts the translator and ending when the translation reaches the addressee, or when the translator is paid’, arguing that ‘research at this third level [...] might lead to improvements in the ecological validity of experimental settings’ (Muñoz Martín 2010:179; see also Saldanha & O'Brien 2013:110). A project is currently run by Haidee Kruger and Bertus van Rooy investigating editorial influence and what they call ‘photoshopped language’ (Kruger forthcoming). So far, hardly any research into this understanding of the translation process exists.

The proposed study argues that the linguistic influence of editors is too significant to be ignored in the corpus-based study of translation. It is the first monograph-length empirical study of the linguistic effects of editing in the translation process. Three well-discussed phenomena of discourse structure are analysed in a corpus of economics articles: grammatical metaphor, the passive and sentence splitting. I will show that editors' changes to the text have considerable impact on its structure, which suggests that published translations may regularly differ significantly from the submitted manuscripts. That, in turn, will question whether corpus-based studies that merely take into account the published translation have sufficient scope to analyse the features of translated language.

Studies of translation-specific phenomena yield the most accurate results if they analyse translated language before the text goes through any other mediation processes. Therefore, this study differentiates between the translation stage and the editing stage in the translation process. A traditional parallel corpus of English management articles that appeared in the Harvard Business Review between 2006 and 2011 and their German translations (published in the Harvard Business Manager a few months after the originals) is complemented by a corpus of the manuscripts of those translations. Those manuscripts were sent to the publisher by the translation company and thus represent translated language before it underwent the editing process. The 316,000 word corpus has been sentence-aligned and part-of-speech-tagged and thus allows a comparison of the translation units in the three subcorpora.

References

Kenny, Dorothy. 2009. Corpora. In Mona Baker & Gabriela Saldanha (eds.), Routledge encyclopedia of translation studies, 2nd edn., 59–62. London: Routledge.

Kruger, Haidee. Forthcoming. A corpus-based study of the effects of editorial intervention: Implications for the features of translated language. In Gert de Sutter, Isabelle Delaere, & Marie-Aude Lefer (eds.), New ways of analysing translational behaviour. Berlin: de Gruyter.

Mossop, Brian. 2007. Revising and editing for translators. 2nd ed. Manchester: St Jerome.

Muñoz Martín, Ricardo. 2010. On paradigms and cognitive translatology. In Gregory M. Shreve & Erik Angelone (eds.), Translation and cognition, 169–187. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

Saldanha, Gabriela. & Sharon O’Brien. 2013. Research methodologies in translation studies. Abingdon: Routledge.

Most corpus-based studies of translation use published texts as the basis for their corpus. This overlooks interventions by other agents involved in translation such as editors, who may have significant influence on the translated text. In order to study editors' influence on the translation product, this paper presents a comparative analysis of manuscript and published translations, which allows a differentiation of actual translated language and edited translated language. Based on a tripartite parallel corpus of English business articles and their translations into German, I analyse translators' and editors' influence on grammatical metaphoricity of the text, specifically on the use of nominalisations. One finding is that a significant amount of nominalisation is re-verbalised by editors. The results show that translated language may often be the result of significant editorial intervention. Thus, by just considering source text and published translation, our picture of what translators actually do may be significantly distorted.

Submitted: Aug 2016; Rev. submitted: Feb 2017; Published online: Apr 2017

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The work of editors and their influence on translated texts is an under-researched phenomenon in translation studies. We usually attribute the language we encounter in translated texts to translators, ignoring any intervention that another agent might have made when producing the translation. This paper deals with editors' influence on nominalisation in English to German translation. There is a conflict between language users' preference in German for a nominal style and the demand by house styles to avoid nominal formulations, based on journalistic presumptions of readers' aversion to that style. Studying expressions that translators nominalised, I investigate when editors intervene to change those expressions into verbal structures and when they decide to retain the nominalisation. I use a corpus of manuscript and published translations of business articles to differentiate translators' and editors' actions. Findings show that editors systematically intervene in the text based on readability considerations. At times the only change they make is turning noun into verb, especially when function verb complexes or preposition-noun-constructions are involved, but often they reformulate the entire sentence. While translators are shown to nominalise a lot more than editors, there are some instances where editors nominalise constructions, again along with significant changes to the sentence.

Submitted: Aug 2016; Rev. submitted: Nov 2016; 2nd rev. submitted: Feb 2017; Published online: May 2017

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Though editing and revising are integral parts of translation, their effects on the language of the final translated text has scarcely been studied. Phenomena we observe in translated text are usually attributed to ‘the translator’, even though the multitude of agents involved in translation may also be responsible for them to various degrees. This paper promotes the use of manuscripts in corpus-based translation studies by investigating differences in nominalisation between unedited and edited translations. Using a corpus of manuscript and published German translations of English business articles, I investigate what may motivate editors to replace a nominalisation in the translation manuscript by a verb to match the English source text. For this purpose, I analyse differences in the process types of the nominalised source text verbs and the structure and information density of the nominal group the nominalisation appears in. The findings show that editors take extensive and systematic influence on the translated text. Crucially, the analysis shows that studies that only consider the published version of a translation often mistake for a literal translation a sentence that has undergone a considerable amount of shifts while passing through the stages of translation.

Submitted: Aug 2016; Rev. submitted: Nov 2016; Published online: Mar 2017

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Studies on a variety of languages have observed a shift away from hypotactic, hierarchical structures towards paratactic, incremental structures, and attributed this to language contact with English in translation. This paper investigates such a shift towards parataxis as the preferred structure of concessive constructions in German business articles. To this effect, a diachronic corpus method that has been applied to popular science articles in existing studies is adopted and applied to business articles, in an attempt to reproduce existing findings for this genre. This method is complemented by a corpus of manuscripts which allow to control for the effect of editing on the translated texts. Based on the analysis of hypotactic and paratactic translations of English concessive conjunctions between 1982/3 and 2008, I argue that hypotactic structures are indeed used less frequently in translated texts, but that this development is restricted to translated language. In non-translated texts, the use of hypotactic conjunctions has increased. The use of sentence-initial conjunctions, however, does seem to spread in this genre (as was reported for popular science), which may be further evidence for it to be a case of language change through contact in translation.

Submitted: Oct 2014; Rev. submitted: Feb 2016; Published online: Apr 2016

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Sentence splitting is assumed to occur mainly in translations from languages that prefer a hierarchical discourse structure, such as German, to languages that prefer an incremental structure. This article challenges that assumption by presenting findings from a diachronic corpus study of English–German business article translations, which shows that sentence splitting has long been common in German business translation, and perhaps because of editorial guidelines, has increased strongly over the course of the 25 years under analysis. A corpus of unedited draft versions and published versions of the same translations is used to show that sentence splitting is also affected by editors where translators did not split the sentence. The evidence suggests that sentence splitting may be a strategy of explicitation in translation rather than a phenomenon triggered mainly in translation into languages with incremental discourse structures. The observed increase in sentence splitting in German may indicate a shift by which meaning relations are increasingly made between sentences using cohesive resources of reference rather than within sentences using grammatical devices such as hypotaxis or parataxis.

“a valuable contribution to the interface of syntax, pragmatics and translation studies”
(Scott, Alan & Marc Pierce. 2016. German studies: Language and linguistics. The Year's Work in Modern Language Studies 76. 337−350.)

Submitted: Nov 2013; Rev. submitted: May 2014; Published online: Jul 2014

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This paper contributes to the field of diachronic corpus studies of linguistic change through language contact in translation by replicating Becher's (2011) study which found a trend from hypotaxis to parataxis in concessive clause complexes of German popular scientific articles, and examining whether a comparable trend can be found in causal clause complexes in another genre. The study draws on a one-million-word translation corpus of English business articles and their German translations, as well as on a comparable corpus of German non-translations. The corpora consist of texts published in two time periods, 1982–3 and 2008. German translations of English causal conjunctions are compared for both time periods to determine diachronic changes in causal clause complexes. The comparable corpus is then analysed to find out whether those changes also happened in non-translated language. While a trend from hypotaxis to parataxis in both corpora can be observed, hypotaxis remains more frequent than parataxis. The study also detects a shift in preference for the causal conjunctions weil, denn and da, which partly causes the decrease in hypotaxis.

Submitted: Aug 2012; Rev. submitted: Nov 2012; Published online: Jan 2013

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The quality of [r] in Germanic dialects is one of the most discussed phonological topics in Historical Linguistics, circling around one main question: Was it front or back? Scholars have proposed a back sound arisen through foreign influence as well as a native uvular trill. In this paper, I offer a comparative survey of the available literature, from the earliest superficial comments to modern in-depth dialect analysis, providing a synthesis of the arguments that have been proposed over time. Though no definite answer can ever be found, I provide what I regard to be a plausible answer as the outcome of the research that underlies this paper.

It has been claimed that translation universals are really “mediation universals” (Chesterman 2004; Ulrych & Murphy 2008), pertaining to the more general cognitive activity of mediating a text rather than specifically translating it. Among those linguistic activities that share the alleged mediation effect with translating are editing and revising. In this chapter, I critically examine the theory of “mediation universals” by comparing unedited translations with edited translations and with edited non-translations. The focus is on explicitation, normalisation/conservatism and simplification. The operationalisations are partly adopted from a similar study on English by Kruger (2012), which the present study seeks to replicate for German management and business articles. The results do not support the notion of mediation universals for the present corpus but rather show that translated texts are recognisable as such even after the editing process. Editorial influence on translated language in this genre is shown to be strongest in terms of sentence length and lexical diversity, where unedited and edited translations differ significantly from each other. Here, editors approximate the language to that of the non-translations, though the unedited translations have a greater average sentence length than the non-translations. That finding does not support the usual observation that translated texts have shorter sentences than non-translations, but highlights the importance of studying editorial influence in translation. That translations are hybrid texts, influenced by many agents other than the translator is now trivial knowledge. Yet corpus research in translation studies still relies mainly on published translations. The findings in this chapter argue for including unedited manuscripts in corpus-based studies of translated language to avoid missing phenomena of translated language that may be removed at the editing stage and to be able to differentiate which features really pertain to the translation act and which are affected by editorial influence.

Submitted: Nov 2015; Conditionally accepted: Mar 2016; Rev. submitted: May 2016

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Guided by the hypothesis that translation is a language contact situation that can influence language change, this study investigates a frequency shift from hypotactic to paratactic constructions in concessive and causal clauses in German management and business writing. The influence of the English SVO word order is assumed to cause language users of German to prefer verb-second, paratactic constructions to verb-final, hypotactic ones. The hypothesis is tested using a 1 million word diachronic corpus containing German translations and their source texts as well as a corpus of German non-translations. The texts date from 1982–3 and 2008, which allows a diachronic analysis of changes in the way English causal and concessive structures have been translated. The analysis shows that in the translations, parataxis is indeed becoming more frequent at the expense of hypotaxis, a phenomenon that, to some extent, also occurs in the non-translations. Based on a corpus of unedited draft translations, it can be shown that translators rather than editors are responsible for this shift. Most of the evidence, however, suggests that the shift towards parataxis is not predominantly caused by language contact with English. Instead, there seems to be a development towards syntactically simpler constructions in this genre, which is most evident in the strong tendency towards sentence-splitting and an increased use of sentence-initial conjunctions in translations and non-translations. This simplification seems to be compensated for, to some extent, by the establishment of pragmatic distinctions between specific causal and concessive conjunctions.