Laviosa, Sara, Pagano, Adriana, Kemppanen, Hannu and Ji, Meng (2017). Textual and Contextual Analysis in Empirical Translation Studies. New Frontiers in Translation Studies. Singapore: Springer, pp. 157, € 71.68. ISBN 978 9811019678.
Since Baker (1993) introduced corpus-driven methodologies into Translation Studies, “corpus translation research has become mainstream in theoretical- and practical-oriented translation studies” (vii) within less than three decades. However, there is still a gap between linguistic (textual) and cultural (contextual) studies in Corpus-based Translation Studies (CTS). The present volume aims to bridge this gap with qualitative approaches and quantitative methods. The five-chapter volume covers both theoretical frameworks and practical techniques from the very beginning to the most recent development of CTS.
To start with, Laviosa reviews the development of CTS in the past two decades and looks to the future by proposing a holistic cultural translation approach to translingual and transcultural academic research and teaching. To further exemplify the interplay between theory and practice, Laviosa draws in Sinclair’s (2003) concordance reading schema and Toury’s (1995[2012]) Descriptive Translation Study procedures. She presents two case studies using the Extended Units of Meaning (EUM) model (Sinclair 1996), one of the central concepts in a corpus-driven approach. With this model, Laviosa expounds the great two-fold power, tools and resources of corpora and elucidates the application of corpus-driven theories in CTS.
In Chapter 2, Kemppanen delineates some specific concepts in keyword analysis (KWA). Combining KWA and narrative analysis, Kemppanen provides a diachronic case study to investigate the distribution of ideology-bound keywords in early Finnish translation of Russian political genres in the Soviet Era and the post-Soviet Era. By analysing the semantic prosody (Louw 1993) from the concordances with the keyword Neuvostoliitto (‘the Soviet Union’), Kemppanen concludes that translations in the two eras reflect different attitudes towards the relationship between Finland and the Soviet Union. The combination of a corpus-driven approach and a narrative analysis in CTS adds a new dimension to the in-depth exploration of translated texts.
In Chapter 3, Kemppanen reviews theoretical and methodological issues in KWA used in different areas. He claims that besides Translation Studies, KWA is also used in linguistics, corpus stylistics, and corpus-based discourse analysis. This multi-disciplinary perspective provides new ideas for keyword research, suggesting that KWA promotes interdisciplinary understandings and that translation scholars could adopt knowledge from other corpus-based language studies.
In the last two chapters, Pagano and Ji explore in detail the combination of corpus analysis and a sociocultural perspective. With a multivariate analysis of fiction written in English and its translations into Brazilian Portuguese, Pagano finds many translation strategies deliberately used by translators to reconstruct original English texts within the Brazilian social and political context. The sociocultural analysis is employed to address the lack of in-depth contextual analysis in corpus-based studies. Combining sentiment annotation and media framing analysis, Ji investigates translated environmental news on BBC China. The corpus analysis reveals strategies in the translation of original English environmental news, e.g. adherence to essential tenets of English-speaking journalism and accommodation to the expectations of the target audience. In this sense, translations of news are conducive to promoting global collaboration on critical issues beyond language and cultural differences.
This volume is a timely and resourceful contribution to CTS. It moves the research focus from macro perspectives (translation universals) to micro ones (in-depth textual analysis of the lexical patterns of translated texts). The empirical exploration of the relationship between textual and contextual factors fills the current translation research gap. The analyses in the last two chapters are particularly impressive for the authors’ profound knowledge in statistical techniques and language analysis.
However, the volume is not without limitations. Firstly, although the book stands out with a corpus-driven approach in Translation Studies, it does not provide a systematic framework of some key theoretical models, e.g. the EUM model, which might have helped interested readers to be better theoretically informed. Secondly, since Chapter 3 focuses on providing an overview of KWA, it would have been more reader-friendly if it had been placed before Chapter 2. Thirdly, some typos and syntactic inaccuracies are also present, e.g. “line 1” in “were then tested (line 1)” should be changed into “line 4” (21).
All that said, this volume is of great value to readers and researchers of Corpus Linguistics, Translation Studies and CTS. It serves as a guide to carry out CTS research.
References
- Baker, Mona (1993). “Corpus Linguistics and Translation Studies. Implications and Applications.” Mona Baker, Gill Francis and Elena Tognini-Bonelli (eds) (1993). Text and Technology. In Honour of John Sinclair. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 233–250.
- Louw, Bill (1993). “Irony in the Text or Insincerity in the Writer? The Diagnostic Potential of Semantic Prosodies.” Mona Baker, Gill Francis and Elena Tognini-Bonelli (eds) (1993). Text and Technology. In Honour of John Sinclair. Amsterdam/ Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 157–176.
- Sinclair, John McHardy (1996). “The search for units of meaning.” Textus: English Studies in Italy 9(1), 75-106.
- Sinclair, John McHardy (2003). Reading Concordances London: Person Education.
- Toury, Gideon (1995[2012]). Descriptive Translation Studies - and beyond (rev. ed.). Amsterdam/Philadephia: John Benjamins.
Xinhua Yuan
Taishan University
E-mail: yuanxinhua@bfsu.edu.cn