Effects of cognitive entrenchment on translation
| Authors | |
|---|---|
| Year of publication | 2023 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | The process of translation can be described as a type of bilingual linguistic production. As such it is driven by conventionalization and entrenchment. The latter is the basic mechanism underlying language learning. The more frequently a linguistic unit is used and encountered, the more entrenched it becomes, leading to its increased salience and accessibility. Translated language is, in addition, prone to various kinds of stylistic impoverishment. In this talk, I present the results of an inquiry into how the Gravitational Pull Model, which links such translational effects to the degree of entrenchment of lexical units, can be used to explain underrepresentation of the Czech concessive construction ‘sice–ale’. The construction is the second most frequently used concessive in non-translated Czech which means that according to the model it should impart magnetism and be used more frequently also in translations. However, contrary to expectations, in translations from English it is much less frequent. On a close inspection, parallel corpus data show that in translations from English the construction often arises not from concessives, but from the adversative conjunction ‘but’. Thus, it is argued that connectivity operates between the more typical concessives in English and Czech, while the ‘sice–ale’ construction, being more on the boundary between concessives and adversatives, is resorted to as a means of explicitating the concessive relation in source texts where ‘but’ is used. The study is a mere probe into translational effects of the structuring of the schematic network of concessives, and experimental data are needed to verify the findings. Nevertheless, it shows that the Gravitational Pull Model can be applied to constructions as well as single-word lexical units. It also hints at ways in which the three sources of translational effects posited in the model can be disentangled. Finally, it stresses the need to incorporate the formal similarity and its impact into the model. |
| Related projects: |