Grammatical metaphor in translation – some methods for corpus-based investigations
Erich H. Steiner · 2002
The focus of this paper will be on investigating textual properties of translations, with special reference to English-German. A number of methods will be critically discussed for empirically testing hypotheses about differences between source language texts and target language texts in cases of translations, as well as between translated and original texts in the same language. We shall then proceed to formulate additional hypotheses about textual properties of translated texts, by modelling in more detail how the process of understanding and unpacking grammatical structures in the process may manifest itself as an independent factor. This will be followed by an analysis of an example of translated text, applying to it some techniques for quantification of lexicogrammatical properties, the aim being to show whether and to what extent there is hope for a closing of the gap between relatively high-level hypotheses and ’raw data’ in electronic corpora.