From Babylon to Bergen: On the usefulness of aligned texts
Signe Oksefjell Ebeling, Jarle Ebeling · Bergen Language and Linguistics Studies · 2013
After outlining a short and select history of (the usefulness of) parallel texts and alignment, this paper presents a case study where the point of departure is a Norwegian text extract aligned against its translations into seven different target languages, using the Translation Corpus Aligner, originally developed by Knut Hofland.Our main concern is cases where there is not a one--to--one correspondence at sentence level between original (source) and translation (target) text.We seek to answer questions such as why a translator, translating into a specific language has chosen to split, or merge, a sentence in the source texts, while translators, translating into other languages have chosen not to do so.The study shows that a multitude of contributing factors seem to be involved , including author and translator style, target language constraints and preferences and perhaps even country--or language--specific translation guidelines.